Hey folks, Wow, I really didn’t expect my overview of Positron to resonate with so many people last week on YouTube! I’ll work on coming up with another video showing Virtual Studio Code (VS Code) in action. As others have mentioned in the episode’s comments, I’m not really sure why Posit is building Positron instead of making things easier within VS Code for R users. To me the need for an IDE that allows people to use multiple programming languages is a red herring - VS Code does that already. Maybe I’m missing something. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that Posit is a company and they must have a business case for Positron. But… do they really want to take on Microsoft, the makers of VS Code? After deleting my Twitter account a couple of months ago, I’ve been lurking on BlueSky waiting for it to take off. Honestly, I don’t really have the time to be scanning social media feeds. But something I miss from Twitter is the community that would post cool figures. I decided to go looking for some of those figures on BlueSky yesterday and found the feed of Tom Calver who is a Data Editor at The Times (of London?). I found this cool figure, which was part of an article he wrote about health care spending in the UK’s National Health System (NHS): I thought this was a fascinating plot. Of course, any health care-related figure has to include the US since we are good at making others look better. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about why countries can improve their life expectancy without spending more money (e.g., Italy and Japan) or why other countries spend more with no or little benefit (e.g., US, Germany, and UK). Something I like about this plot is that Claver shows the passage of time with a trail of smaller points. On the web, this is an interactive figure that you can hover over a point and get a pop-up to tell you about the point. I’ll focus on the static parts of the plot. This is a bubble plot that you could generate using First, the size legend is built into the data. Do you see it? For the Germany series of points the smallest point has 2000 next to it and the largest has 2023 next to it. A common theme in recent newsletters has been looking for ways to build legends into the data so that the reader doesn’t have to look off to a margin to understand what they are seeing. I really like this effect. I’d probably add this legend with Second, it is interesting that the older points appear to fall on top of the newer points. Except for the 2023 points, which fall on top of the 2019 points (the 2020-2022 data were excluded). Doing this with Third, this plot doesn’t have tick marks on the axes, but does have grid lines on both axes. This is another emerging theme. Why include tick marks if you have grid lines? I’m not generally a fan of grid lines, but I have to agree with these developers that if you’re using them you don’t need the tick marks. I think they’re extraneous. Fourth, this plot puts the x and y-axis titles at the outer reach of the axes. We see “Life expectancy” in the upper left corner and “Per-capita spend” in the bottom right corner. I’m not 100% what I think of this yet. I kind of like it for the x-axis because it keeps the title from getting lost in the caption at the bottom. What do you think? I’d remove the typical titles with Fifth, I like how “UK” has a red background with white font in the title. In the past, I’ve highlighted a variable by changing the title text to the relevant color. I suspect the background color helps “UK” pop more than if “UK” was written in red font, even if it were bolded. I would likely pull this off using Finally, there are a few odds and ends. Something that stands out as weird to me is how the US’s 2000 to 2002 points for fall outside the plotting window. Why? Regardless, we could pull this off using If you want to take a swing at making this figure, you should be able to get the life expectancy data from OECD and the healthcare expenditure data from the WHO.
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Hey folks, I’ve now produced three livestream videos. What do you think? Do you watch them live or watch them later? Or are they too long? I’m looking for honest feedback! I have to admit that if I hadn’t livestreamed these videos, they would not have been produced. It’s nice that I can more or less record and post without any editing. This is still a bit of an experiment. I think fewer people are watching the episodes which makes me worry that this might be an overall step backwards for you...
Hey folks! Do you ever get that feeling where you’re scared to try something? But then you do it anyway… and it turns out way better than you expected? Well that was me on Wednesday morning. I ran my first livestream on YouTube recreating a ridgeline plot from Our World in Data showing the US baby boom. I wrote about it here in the newsletter back in May. The full session was about 2.5 hours. YouTube tells me that 272 people popped in at some point during the session. To be honest, I really...
Hey folks, I need your feedback on an idea! Don’t worry, there’s some visualization stuff at the bottom. I had a video nearly ready to post this week using a ridgeline plot to show the baby boom. I think I did a great job of recreating the plot. But through a series of unfortunate events, I lost the video. I actually recorded the video three times because my computer kept crashing as I was recording it. This was on top of increasing busyness on my part with teaching, proposal writing,...