Over the holiday season I heard several discussions on which charities are best to donate to and why some are better than others. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to examine the stats which set one charity over another and find a way to visualize these in an effective manner. With some help from Charity Navigator, I was able to source and collect the appropriate information and thought it a great time to finally give Plotly a go.

As in the last post, here's some more work in excel with economic variables. This time I use value forecasts of 30y mortgage, unemployment, and personal income rates, figured in a similar manner as before (annual growth/change rates - 10y moving averages) to predict future levels of personal consumption expenditures. I run a multilinear regression analysis to forecast PCE based upon the three independent variables and end up with some pretty strong results and an adjusted R-squared of .974.

I grabbed some economic data from FRED and attempt to forecast future values for each variable using Excel. Econ variables of focus for this project include GDP, CPI, and the unemployment rate for the U.S. This was originally done for my Macro-econometrics class and provided me some nice time with Excel which I admittedly use too little.

An assortment of word clouds I made from lyrics I scraped for a school project. Size of each word is relative to frequency of usage by the artist in (up to) 150 of their most recent songs. Mount Eerie references nature a lot while Aesop Rock just references A LOT of things. Harry and the Potters, well... .