The University of Maryland (UMD) has a substantial dataset on acts of terrorism dating back to 1970. Their research has documented over 150K incidents across 206 countries. In this election year (and nearly every election year), there is an ongoing conversation on the safety and stability of the US and the threat of terrorist groups. On both sides, there is less of a dialogue about the recent exponential surge in terror related events globally, particularly in a select few

Kaggle support a wide variety of open-source datasets, and their collection of election data is trove of great material. One of their most robust files is data on every county in the US with over 50 demographic features ranging from land usage to socioeconomic. Given the highly dimensional dataset, I wanted to use principal component analysis to plot all counties revealing the similarities and dissimilarities. The plot below shows the distance of each county based on the si

A FiveThirtyEight dot com recently released a podcast episode with the founder of Mapping Police Violence (check it out here). Mapping Police Violence (MPV) looks across multiple sources in an attempt to collect all incidents of police involved killings in the US. Below is a heat map of all the zip codes with police violence with a scale from white to blue indicating the number of lives lost. In an attempt at to examine the underlying communities affected, I paired MPV data

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have logged countless hours in front of a podium the past several months. This provides an opportunity to use natural language processing to drill down on their messages. Using a sentiment analysis toolkit which employs three sentiment dictionaries , I examined one speech for each candidate. Given the range of topics being discussed in rallies and with the press, I thought it best to look at both candidate's Super Tuesday victory speeches.

In 1996, Australia experienced a mass shooting where 35 lives were taken at the now-called Port Arthur Massacre. That year, the country passed stricter gun control regulations (automatic weapons ban, tightened licensing on gun licensing and national registration of firearms). It has since seen a sharp decline in gun-related deaths. What would it look like if the US saw the same level of success as Australia with stricter gun controls? The sharpest decline is in the first t