Alex Pennington

Everything can become a game, even fantasy-themed politics of kingdoms or watching a show about the very subject. Using data from the draft we had around season 7 of GoT (thanks to the fun fantasy-league site  Fantasizr ) I created a few visualizations to help me understand the points distribution so I could hopefully do better in season 8. Figure 1 - Overall, teams that did well consistently gained points in each episode. Figure 2 - Not all episodes are equal, there are clear spikes, but still plenty of points to be had all around. Figure 3 -  Points for violence and status, and to a lesser extent wits, made all the difference between high and low earners. Food and nudity aren't worth much overall. Figure 4 - Jamie is the most well-rounded, which is probably what is needed to consistently pick up points across all episodes. If no all rounders exist, a witty character with a penchant for violence is the key.

Screen time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe... This is not the most helpful of charts, but these types of visualizations can provide insights on pathways and weights of variables. Initially a bit of fun I had when learning how to create these charts for an internal report, I figured I would finish it off. The data comes from  IMDB and follows many main characters (on the left) on-screen time throughout all current MCU films (on the right) with screen time shown by the thickness of the link between character and film.* I learned with these charts that the googleViz Sankey charts are not the easiest to manipulate. Changing the colors to match the hero colors was a challenge and the actual ordering of nodes and links is restricted by how the chart is put together. For example the Iron Man films are out of order as both 1 and 3 have fewer crossover characters, so Iron Man 2 is moved to the bottom to accommodate the inclusion of From nodes on the left. It would have b...

The interaction between the branches of state governments occur under a variety of arrangements which, as opposed to the singular federal government, offers empirical leverage as well as an insight as to the effects of different institutional practices. In regards to the federal bureaucracy, the capability of Congress in its oversight capacity has been debated 1 as has the courts power of judicial review over the bureaucracy. 2,3 Agencies are a stronghold of executive power, thus both the legislative and judicial branches of government have an interest, maybe even a duty, to check the power of agencies directed by a president or governor. By observing variation between the states, can the law-making body use its legislative powers to create access to the courts and shift the burden of oversight to the judicial branch? Judicial Access across the States To create a measure of ‘Judicial Access’ (JA) I coded the following variables from various provisions in administrative...