As someone whose day job is in the travel and tourism industry, I have to work with airport codes, names, and locations all the time. airportr is a lightweight package to help deal with a few common airport related tasks. This package bundles open license airport data from OurFlights with several utility functions and does not require any API calls or dependencies beyond dplyr. airportr is easy to install from Github (or soon CRAN). Read more

This interesting post by Nathanael Lauster caught my eye last week looking at the gradual shift in age-specific birth rates for women in British Columbia over the last few decades. Nathanael is a Professor of Sociology at UBC and you may have heard of his book “The Life and Death of the Single-Family House”. Too pretty not to share: illustrating the Great Wait, a.k.a. the gradual shift in timing of childbearing in BC. Read more

TL;DR: Small multiples maps are one of my favourite ways to communicate multiple variables with a quantitative and spatial dimension. This example uses small multiples to show the distribution of the most spoken non-English languages in the Toronto CMA. Scroll to the end to see the results. After seeing the excellent electoral results maps from the Berliner Morgenpost, I wanted to experiment with a similar approach for an alternative take on my maps of linguistic diversity in Canadian cities. Read more

The Confusion of Tongues, Gustav Doré, engraving c.1865-1868 Language Diversity Index The Language Diversity Index is a quantitative measure of the diversity of languages found in a given area. In a country like Canada with two official languages, a rich history of diverse Aboriginal languages, and a long history of immigration from a wide range of countries and ethno-linguistic cultures, we would expect to see a relatively high score for linguistic diversity. Read more

R Packages cancensus Co-creator and maintainer Reference Page | Github Access, retrieve, and work with Canadian Census data and geography. Download data and Census geography in tidy and analysis-ready format Convenience tools for searching for and working with Census regions and variable hierarchies Provides Census geography in multiple R spatial formats Provides data and geography at multiple Census geographic levels including province, Census Metropolitan Area, Census Division, Census Subdividision, Census Tract, and Dissemination Areas Provides up-to-date data for the 2016, 2011, and 2006 Censuses airportr Creator Read more

I’m finally getting around to starting a blog/personal site. I’ve thought about it for a long time but never set down to actually do it. There are several motivations behind this blog: I find more and more that other people’s personal blogs – as well as sites like R-bloggers and R Views – are the best place to learn new methods, learn about new packages, and to be inspired by the work of other people. Read more

Hugo is a static site engine written in Go. It makes use of a variety of open source projects including: Cobra Viper J Walter Weatherman Cast Learn more and contribute on GitHub. Setup Some fun facts about Hugo: Built in Go Loosely inspired by Jekyll Primarily developed by spf13 on the train while commuting to and from Manhattan. Coded in Vim using spf13-vim Have questions or suggestions? Read more

I am an economics and data science professional with interests in applying statistical and ML approaches to strategic problems. I am Canadian but currently based in Singapore where I work as a lead economist at Grab, South-East Asia’s largest tech company. I try to support open-source projects and open data where possible. I’m the co-creator of the cancensus and cansim packages. Many of the posts on this page that relate to Canadian data use one or both of these packages, which I likely to shamelessly promote. Read more