Assembling my own autonomous data blogging team: quality and workflow improvements from moving to a multi-agent workflow

An experiment in using LLMs to automate social science writing. Here’s what I learned about LLM-assisted social science blogging.

A step-by-step guide to creating spatially-contiguous socioeconomic clusters in R using the SKATER algorithm

How many hawker centres and stalls are a short walk away from me at any given location in Singapore? An interactive map, and a step-by-step guide of how it was made.

What does it mean to be “normal”? Consider for a moment the quintessential Canadian city. What does that image in your head look like? Are there outdoor rinks, wheat fields, and abundant Timmies? Does your mental image include a yoga studio, a dispensary, and a third-wave coffee shop? Canadians like to celebrate a self-constructed identity of diversity-the cultural mosaic- that is punctuated with conspicuous Canadiana that binds everything together. Canada is a highly urbanized country–it is a nation of cities, and while every Canadian city has elements that scream “Canada!”, is there a city that can stand above the rest and definitely claim to be the most quintessentially Canadian city of them all? Read more

(Updated October 16, 2018) With the election coming up in the next week and this page getting more traffic, I decided to do a quick refresh of the data used in this post up to and including October 15. Changes are relatively few, and as this site is a github repo, can be tracked via commits to this post. The 2018 Municipal Election in Vancouver On October 20, a relatively small portion of Vancouverites will vote to elect a mayor, 10 city councillors, 7 park board commissioners and 9 school trustees. Municipal elections do not receive the fanfare or attention of federal or provincial elections and see lower turnouts, but they are an important determinant towards the policies that affect the everyday lives of city residents. Read more

Preamble This was a short post that turned into a longer post. The purpose of short post was to highlight and share a new package we have been working on to improve access to Canadian statistical data. This then turned into a post about domestic tourism patterns, and ultimately a discussion about two different types of visualization techniques for comparing changes over time. Jens and I have been working on an R package to work with Statistics Canada’s public datasets (traditionally referred to as CANSIM tables). I’ll touch more on the purpose of this package shortly, but as the package heads towards completion it needs bug-fixing, tidying, and thoughtful critique ahead of any future CRAN release, and that requires more eyeballs on the code, and more users playing around with the package. Read more

Vector tiles? When MapQuest and later Google Maps came on the scene we were blown away by the detail, speed, and convenience of “slippy maps” that you could scroll, pan, and drag across. The concept underpinning those maps was the use of tiles: pre-rendered map cells for every specified zoom level that would be loaded by your browser as you scrolled through a map. For many years after their introduction, these slippy maps used raster-based bitmaps as their tiles. As these tiles were images, that the only information available was pixel and colour. Read more