Kansas 2014 Governor's Election
So, I finally put my thoughts on the Kansas 2014 governor's election into written form. I had felt for quite a while that people let their hopes about the outcome of the election, combined with bad...
View ArticleEducation Spending and Advanced Analytics
I did a writeup on public spending in Kansas, and more broadly, the idea of using sophisticated analytics to determine appropriate levels of funding for public education, and potentially other...
View ArticleKansas Election Fraud 2014?
A local Wichita news story about potential election fraud in the Kansas 2014 election caught my eye today. A lot of progressive friends had been posting links to the article and other commentary,...
View ArticleKansas Election Fraud 2014? pt 2
So my last analysis on this garnered a fair amount of positive attention, so I decided to do a second analysis. And probably continual analyses on this topic. The background here is a Kansas...
View ArticleKansas Electoral Fraud Part 3
This will be my last post on this subject, as, after I delved further into the data, I found no reason to believe that Clarkson's original claim that the correlation between precinct size and...
View ArticleDoes education spending matter?
Short answer to this question? Yes. So after much frustration over the current education funding debate in Kansas, I decided to replicate the 2006 education cost study statistical study, to answer...
View ArticleDiversity Matters: Measuring It
This week, I explored a metric I used about a decade ago to measure diversity and its effects. Essentially, it seeks to solve the statistical problem of not having a good way to measure diversity as a...
View ArticleCleveland Police Demographic Differences
After blogging and writing a diary yesterday regarding some work I've done in measuring diversity in populations in different nerdy ways, I thought I would be done with the subject for a while....
View ArticleSales Versus Income Tax Does it Matter?
The short answer? Sales tax creates about four-times tax increase to poor citizens as it does rich citizens in Kansas.Given the recent budget crisis in Kansas, there were a lot of accusations flying...
View ArticleLower Sales Tax on Food: A Solution for Kansas
As the Kansas budgetary struggles continue to make big news, one proposal has come up to reduce the sales tax on food while simultaneously raising sales tax on other purchases. I decided to dive into...
View ArticleRegressive Final Kansas Tax Policy
Not a lot to say here as I have covered most of it in my prior posts. Essentially the Kansas legislature finally came to a solution with their tax policy, and chose the most regressive option. For a...
View ArticleIt's Costly to Drive for Groceries
I've written before on prior diaries regarding the Kansas food sales tax rate, which is set to become the highest in the nation. A couple of common contentions about the food tax rate are that:-It...
View ArticleOver a third of African Americans in NW KS in Prison
I was doing some dating site related research for a friend the other day (long story, don't ask), and ran into some weird rural demographic trends. Specifically, I started running into certain rural...
View ArticleHow much do we actually talk about gun control after shootings?
I've seen many accusations that liberals are too eager to capitalize on mass shootings to talk about gun control. This raises the question in my mind of how much we actually talk about gun control post...
View ArticleTrump Won't Win the Primary
I have had several friends (smart people, all of them) talk to me, worrying that Donald Trump may actually be our next President. Even "experts" on the subject like Ezra Klein have started to talk...
View ArticleKansas Election Fraud and Suburbanization
Last week a couple of things happened that threw me back into the world of Kansas Election Fraud. First, the story became big news again, drawing even some national attention. Second, a shady...
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Voter Suspensions in Kansas: A Deep Dive
A few diarists have talked about voter suppression in Kansas ranging fromBeth Clarkson's claims of outright vote manipulation to two track voting and citizenship documentation requirements. The...
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Gender and Body in Presidential Candidates
Just a short write-up here. I had been playing around a bit with some data mining technology using the google search API, and had also come to realize the number of sites on the internet dedicated to...
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