Statistics with Sasa

The Senate is currently in intense debate regarding raising the federal minimum wage. Several potential wages have been proposed, including a $10/hour plan from Senators Romney and Cotton  and a more generous $15/hour plan from the progressive Democrats. Right now the current federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 per hour, which 21 states (including my notably Blue home state of Virginia) adhere to. While the debate rages on, I wanted to take a closer look at the history of the minimum wage, the concept of a "living wage", and how these two terms invariably tie together across the United States.  More importantly, at some point, there are diminishing returns and increasing costs to increasing the minimum wage. So where should we settle? The History of the Minimum Wage This isn't a history blog, so I'll be brief. The minimum wage was established under the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and set at $0.25/hour, which is worth around $4.60/hour today. Since then, it has ...

Today's been a big day in the stock market . Lots of people have lost a lot of money, and a lot of people are understandably really upset . Here's a quick breakdown of what's happened so far A subreddit called /r/wallstreetbets  (visit at your own peril), which has exploded in popularity recently and has over 5 million subscribers (and counting) got really excited about three stocks: GME (Gamestop), AMC (the movie theater place), and BB (Blackberry). Gamestop was the main stock.  Yes, I know all three companies are doing terribly in the real world. I won't go into why they got excited about the stocks here.  They convinced a lot of other people to buy the stocks and they did well. Really well. Take a look at their Yahoo Finance pages and look at their 1 month price charts (then ignore the past two days). GME , BB , AMC Everyone got in on it, and I mean it. When a lot of people buy a single stock, the price rises. It turns out, this was hurting a lot of Hedge Funds and I...

 As you might have noticed, I post rather erratically and infrequently. There's a lot of reasons why, but the main reason why is that writing is hard. Behind the scenes, I often spend 40+ hours on some of my blogposts between idea generation, data cleaning, learning about the topic, analysis, and writing. Even worse, frequently I spend a lot of time on an idea and find that my results aren't worth writing about (uninteresting results, messy data etc.). I've currently got a "Blog" folder on my computer with dozens of folders with ideas with input data and code analyzing said data, but only around 10 published blogposts to show for it.  This is a hobby that I do for fun, but I would still like to see the blog grow (and it kind of has), and I recognize that's probably not going to happen without some consistency in posts. Some of the more successful bloggers I know  blog far more frequently (I'm talking weekly), but that isn't exactly a pace I can sustain...

Have you ever thought about bringing cold, hard statistics to one of life's greatest artistic joys? Well fear not, because in our increasingly data-driven world, our analyst friends are hard at work attempting to statistisize (numerize?) everything you can think of, so we can analyze and therefore optimize it. One of the art realms that is increasingly falling under the purview of data science is music. We all benefit from it in the form of curated daily Spotify playlists and Pandora stations that allow us to find new artists and songs.  I was recently able to get my hands on a Spotify dataset  that contains data on over 160k tracks dating from 1921 through December 2020. Aside from containing some basic features like track name, duration, and release date, it also contains some advanced metrics as calculated by Spotify like "track positivity" (is it a sad, depressed song, or a happy, positive song?), "danceability", "energy", "speechiness" (...

It's Thanksgiving, also known as DJ Khaled's birthday , and COVID-19 is back with a vengeance. We've all been cautioned by the CDC to celebrate a socially distanced holidays this year, and the data shows most of us are ignoring them so far.  I'm not here to lecture anyone about that -- but also you're all terrible people.  I'm here to talk about what's different about this so-called "Third Wave", which has been going on since October. Specifically, there has been a stark Urban-Rural Divide , which has been wildly easy to see in the data. Rural areas, which managed to avoid a lot of the initial damage of COVID, are getting especially hammered now. And the data indicate they may not have the resources to deal with it.  Urban-Rural Divide Measuring COVID One of the best ways to measure the ever-evolving conditions of COVID is daily new cases. This metric is unstable, so researchers typically take a moving average   over a 5-7 day period instead. Daily...

The president has COVID . A number of his close confidants, including Kellyanne Conway and Chris Christie , have COVID diagnoses of their own. It appears that Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett's Rose Garden Nomination Ceremony  was a "superspreader" event that spread COVID among all levels of government -- from the Presidency to the Senate.  There were some key details to the ceremony: it was largely mask-less , it ignored social distancing protocols  and it was a GOP event (I'll get into that later). Descriptions of the event paint a picture of an administration unconcerned with traditional COVID precautions. There were few face masks present and people were seated closely together. Instead, the White House relied on rapid COVID tests, which deliver results in 15 minutes, to screen guests for the Coronavirus prior to entering the Rose Garden.  However, frustratingly, the Trump Administration completely misused these tests -- putting everyone who attended the e...

COVID has been tough for all of us. It's been 171 days since the White House declared coronavirus a National Emergency, and life hasn't been the same since. As with any major life change, there are bound to be mental health effects for a lot of us. The CDC even has an entire page  on taking care of your mental health during the pandemic. In fact,  the pandemic has indeed coincided with a mental health crisis,  and mental health is arguably in the public eye more than ever.    In the spirit of this, I thought I would do an article on mental health in America. I use a pre-pandemic survey of roughly 500,000 Americans called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) collected in 2018-19. Importantly, I don't measure mental health by rate of psychiatric disorders (depression, anxiety, etc.) in a population. Rather, I measure well-being based on the answer to the survey question:    " Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress...