Effervescent Ideas

  Illinois is famous for being one of the very few states in the country with negative population growth.   The goal of this analysis is to i dentify the key reasons for the declining population by extracting  meaningful insights   from unstructured text. The raw text used for this project is in the form of roughly 300,000 news articles and titles scraped from the web that reference Illinois, Chicago, or Springfield. This project was completed in Python & Pyspark with several Natural Language Processing packages. 

The final presidential debate took place last Thursday October 22nd 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The transcript for the debate can be found here : Using a web-scraping tool, I was able to access the digital transcript and isolate each candidates' speaking portions in order to run some exploratory text analysis. Disclaimer- this post will not include any political commentary. Rather, I am interested in uncovering any patterns that occurred in the transcript.   First off, how many times did each candidate speak?  Donald Trump, despite the first ever introduction of a mute button  during a presidenti, was credited for speaking 62 more times than his opponent. Next, what words were most frequently used by each candidate? With minimal processing, below are the results for the candidates: Visualized a different way, we can clearly see some significant overlap between the two: These top word breakdowns get a little more interesting when we add some of these frequently occurrin

According to the American Lung Association , ' Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that may be caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi. The infection causes the lungs' air sacs (alveoli) to become inflamed and fill up with fluid or pus. That can make it hard for the oxygen you breathe in to get into your bloodstream. The symptoms of pneumonia can range from mild to severe, and include cough, fever, chills, and trouble breathing.' Pneumonia Infographic Patients with pneumonia could have the following symptoms: Cough that produces phlegm or sometimes blood Fever Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing Chills or shaking Fatigue Sweating Chest or muscle pain If a person is suspected of having pneumonia, a doctor will begin by asking the patient about their medical history and symptoms. Next will be a physical exam, so the doctor can listen to the patient's lungs. In checking for pneumonia, a doctor will listen for abnormal sounds like crackling, rumbling or wheezing. I

 The efficacy of image classification has grown leaps and bounds in recent years with the advent of neural networks. Without going into too much detail, an artificial neural network consists of a series of layers through which inputs flow becoming output predictions. Each layer is composed of a predetermined number of neurons, and each neuron feeds information to the next layer of neurons via weighted connections. These weights are real numbers that flow from layer to layer eventually reaching an output layer, producing a numerical prediction.  For the purposes of image classification, the inputs are pixels. These pixels are converted to numeric inputs by gray-scale figures or color codes (RBG, hex, etc). The output is the neural network's prediction of what that image contains. The neural network learns using a dataset of labeled images; recording correct predictions and attempting to grasp what elements of a picture correspond to which labels.  This abstract concept can be intui

 Have you ever wondered where in the world famous artists' work currently resides? I was, so I built this interactive dashboard  (follow the link for the interactive version, below is just a snapshot) to help answer that question. Additionally, the world's largest museums typically only display roughly 5% of their collection at any given time, so I included a graphic outlining the proportion of that artist's work on display vs in storage.  Disclaimer: The data included is a global snapshot gathered in 2016, so changes likely have been made to the locations of certain pieces included in this dataset.

My last post included some exploratory data analysis into global production of different types of food, with an emphasis on meat and animal feed. The FAO dataset also includes information on beer yields per country. My internal beer-nerd could not resist but investigate the trends there-within as well. In the post-prohibition era, China took the beer throne from the USA in 2003 during a period of explosive growth undoubtedly driven by the rise of CR Snow . Snow beer, founded in 1993 is currently the world's #1 selling beer with 93 breweries operating across mainland China in 25 different provinces.  The Brazilian beer market shows promising growth as well increasing production by 54% from 2000-2013. Finally, Germany has experienced a gradual decline in production since it peaked at 12 million tons of beer produced in 1992. I personally am very interested to see how our current global pandemic will impact these figures. With 'going out' virtually eliminated worldwide for a