If you want to plot cities on a map, for example to show locations of law schools on a map of the United States, you need to have the longitude and latitude of each school’s city. The brute force way to get those geographic intersections of longitude and latitude, which…
As explained before, a choropleth map colors geographic regions according to some variable. The choropleth map below shows the United States and the regions are some of its states. Those states are colored on a gradient by a variable: the number of graduates from highly-ranked law schools in the state…
Continuing the analysis of Fortune 500 chief legal officers, let’s test a hypothesis: the better the law school, the more of its graduates lead one of these illustrious legal departments. To have data regarding which schools are better, I incorporated the rankings of about 150 law schools in 2013 by…
ALM publishes data about the Fortune 500 companies and their chief legal officers. One of the pieces of information is the law school from which the CLO graduated. Firing up my trusty software for data analysis, I looked at the distribution of those graduates. The plot below shows how many…
A column in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, July 2014 at 10, argues against House Republicans’ efforts to prevent the Department of Education from collecting and publishing data on college costs. Without good information on such matters as all-in costs of attending a school or graduation rates, prospective students will be left mostly…
One hugely important lesson branded into me from analyzing data is the importance of step-by-step procedures. This may sound elementary, but when you start with an Excel file of data from a client, it is crucially important to keep an audit trail of each step of your transformations and calculations.…
Two very common steps for a data analyst are to subset data or to aggregate data. When you write code that subsets data, you instruct the computer to pick out a portion of the data and work with that smaller set. For example if you have data on law firm…
I had just written about levels of state regulatory burdens when I read two editorials in the New York Times, July 7, 2014 at A17. One of them describes four ways that GDP calculations mismeasure the size of our economy. For example, the author writes “In its first 20 years,…
From Wikipedia we learn that a choropleth is a “thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income.” The Economist, July 5, 2014 at 23, shows a choropleth of…
Another perspective on the law firms that were ranked highest on M&A deals is to look at the average size of the deals they worked on. That data appears in the following plot. The X-axis shows average deal size in billions of US dollars. The plot adds another piece of…