Category: My Work

  • Some Data on Deaths in Gaza and Israel

    I’ve seen an uptick in traffic to the blog the last few days, specifically my older content on the Middle East. I don’t exactly have the bandwidth to track the conflict between Israel and Gaza in addition to Covid-19 and my other projects. But as we approached the ten-day mark since Hamas first fired rockets…

  • Baseball’s Injury Problem

    Last week, Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic wrote an article examining the recent spate of injuries in Major League Baseball. For those interested in the sport, the article is well worth the read. For the unfamiliar, baseball played only about 1/3 of the number of games as usual last year due to Covid-19. This year,…

  • Covid Update: 9 May

    Last week I wrote about how, for new cases, we had seen a few consecutive days of increasing cases. Were we witnessing an aberration, a one-off “well, that was weird”? Or was this the beginning of a trend towards increasing new cases? A week later and we have our answer. Just a one-off. If we…

  • Covid Update: 2 May

    I didn’t write a post last Monday, but this Monday I am. A few things may have changed in the Covid situation. The most important is that we may have finally seen the peak of this current wave’s surge of new cases. For the last few weeks we’ve seen cases rising in the five states.…

  • Expansion Teams in Baseball

    I was not planning on posting this today, because I was—am?—still working on it. But there was some baseball news last night that prompted me to export what I had to try and get this live. For a little while now I’ve been wondering why a number of baseball stars, albeit in their later years,…

  • Arrowheads

    I don’t know if this is a trend, but I’ve now seen a few graphics appearing using arrows to show the direction or trend of the data. This graphic in an article by Bloomberg prompted me to talk about this piece. I should add, after rereading my draft, that I’m not clear who made this…

  • Covid Update: 18 April

    Last week I wrote about how we may have been beginning to see divergent patterns in new cases, i.e. how New Jersey in particular had seen its new cases numbers falling whilst other states continued with increasing case counts. One week later, that may still broadly hold true. Emphasis on may. If we look at…

  • Covid Update: 11 April

    This time last week I wrote about how we should not be surprised at rising levels of coronavirus in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. After all, our elected officials reopened economies despite data saying they should do otherwise. On top of that, people have been engaging in reckless behaviour and…

  • What Is Infrastructure?

    This morning I read a piece in Politico Playbook that broke down President Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal for infrastructure spending. A thing generally regarded as the United States sorely needs. $2.25 trillion is a lot of money and it’s a fair question to ask whether all that money is really money for infrastructure. Because, it…

  • Covid Update: 4 April

    Last week I wrote about how the inevitable rise in new Covid-19 cases was occurring in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. Now, one, in the last week, we saw no evidence of states preparing to reinforce their public health and safety restrictions. And two, whilst we have no data on people not following…