Jonathan Marshall

Visualizing {dplyr}’s mutate(), summarize(), group_by(), and ungroup() with animations | Andrew Heiss Visually explore how {dplyr}’s more complex core functions work together to wrangle data

Great post by @andrew.heiss.phd on animating #rstats {dplyr} operations

www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/04...

People Watching: Metlifecare Bayswater Retirement Village, Mt Maunganui, at lunchtime on a sunny Thursday

We'd love to have a huge turn out for Nic's talk. Please help spread the word. There are downloadable pdf adverts in the link below. They can be emailed or printed. If you work in a public space (e.g. Library) you could help by printing and posting one of the flyers. Ngā mihi nui!

We’re proud to announce that Mark Gregory, Chartered Transport Planning Professional and chair of the Transportation Group, will be joining @StuartBDonovan for our panel discussion on a City of 1.5 Million on October 20.

Tickets are nearly sold out, grab one below 👇

Auckland City Council ballot returns, as of Tuesday 7th October. 18% back as of today.

Tracking lower than any previous year.

Nice! Palmy is super easy too (50 places to drop off vote - I used the Pak N save one) plus rock the vote afternoon and repurposed traffic sign trailers telling you to vote on each major city entrance. Whereas Kapiti coast had just 5 drop-in points in total.

Train map sells out in hours after Wellington launch An Auckland-based, self-taught computer programmer has achieved sell-out success by creating a live train map for two of New Zealand’s busiest rail lines.

#TransportNews: An Auckland-based, self-taught computer programmer has achieved sell-out success by creating a live train map for two of New Zealand’s busiest rail lines.

Via The Post: www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3608...

Data Behind the Scenes 2025 - YouTube Data Behind the Scenes is a data conference by data practitioners, for data practitioners. We come together to share stories and experiences about the the me...

The videos from the #DataBS Conference have made it to YouTube!

Over the coming days, we'll highlight sessisons from the event -- one post per talk.

You can also sneak ahead by going straight to the YouTube playlist, here:

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Sand truck gets stuck on Wellington beach A truck helping replenish sand on Oriental Bay's beaches in Wellington got stuck in the sand it was working on.

The latest volume in the Little Yellow Digger series looks quite gritty eh…

#pukapuka www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

10k rates, insurance. 2.5k petrol plus prob at least another 1k in upkeep (underestimate!) plus insurance at 500 and they prob have 2 cars (so double it) and possibly paying them off. 3-4k power, 1k internet, 1k phone for 2 plus gym? It’s not a frugal way to live but doesn’t seem way off base.

Yeah, the $500/week for all that doesn’t seem that out of whack to me.

Two Ruru Print Club: A Print Club With A Difference The best way to collect Josh Drummond's artwork. These prints are postcards! Plus, free access to the archive of every artwork I've ever made. Forever.

Every time I see another raft of posts kvetching about how a social media site is terrible in the same way all social media sites are terrible, I’m going to spam the link to my snail mail club to remind people that there’s an alternative to this bullshit www.tworuru.com/printclub/

why is the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society published by Oxford when it could have been Random House

Ah, the joy of freelance life. A couple of 2026 funding pools have just dried up, so if anyoneʻs interested in a project with a Wikipedian, now’s the time to get in touch. www.rove.wiki

House listing photo from Trademe, NZ. it’s a small sunroom with a golden retriever staring in outside the back door.

I was admiring this one this morning.

Love it!

For folks here (rather than LinkedIn), my last day at NZ Police is 31 October. Taking a little break and welcoming our second child in February. Let me know if you have any part-time contract work coming up where I might be able to add value!

But if you don’t live by your principles, they start to look less like principles, and more like self-interest. On Waatea, Seymour left no room for doubt: he believes meaningful election changes should be put to a public vote before they’re enacted. Surely what’s good for the lefty goose is good for the libertarian gander. The Electoral Amendment Bill will have its second reading in the coming months. There’s still time for the deputy prime minister – and the government – to have a change of heart, and show some consistency.

Was surprised to learn on Waatea News recently that the deputy PM doesn’t think politicians should change election rules without a public vote, and am expecting that Act will withdraw its support for restrictions on voter registration any day now thespinoff.co.nz/politics/01-...

A digital flatlay of two Karearea t-shirts, white with red ink, featuring a swooping falcon snapping an arrow in half above rising flames. It says Nature Reigns Eternal

A digital artwork featuring a swooping falcon snapping an arrow in half above rising flames.

A mockup of a unisex Karearea t-shirt, white with red ink, featuring a swooping falcon snapping an arrow in half above rising flames. It says Nature Reigns Eternal

Artwork of a Karearea, white with red ink, featuring a swooping falcon snapping an arrow in half above rising flames. It says Nature Reigns Eternal

KĀREAREA WINS BIRD OF THE YEAR!
(and I fortunately had a design of this beauty already cooking...)

Now available for pre-order, this fierce tee for the defenders of nature, non-tolerators of bullshit, and friends of the forest.

Pre-order at pepperraccoon.com

Another memory of this interview is my amazement that he managed to read loads of books while knocking back spirits. Me: "Do you really have no trouble concentrating on reading while you're drinking?" Lemmy: "None at all. And I have no trouble concentrating on drinking while I'm reading either."

A cow I photographed, shortly after she had recorded a song which hit the exquisite midpoint between 'See Emily Play' by Pink Floyd and 'Private Sorrow' by The Pretty Things, but which she was still unhappy about, due to being a brutal perfectionist, forever in search of the perfect, transcendental psychedelic pop song.

This cow and I had weeks of face-to-face discussions and zoom calls about the cover photo for its innovative psychedelic debut LP and rejected many images which less perfectionist humans and cattle might have considered pretty fucking great but I think we finally nailed it.

24 years ago I was sent to a London pub by a newspaper to interview and drink whisky (no “e” over here) with Lemmy, who was in the band Motorhead and, before that, slightly less famously, Hawkwind and, before that, much less famously, Sam Gopal. We had a good chat: about being from the part of the Midlands north of the River Trent, about books, and about roadying for Hendrix in the mid-60s (him, not me; I was minus nine at the time). When the record company PR sidled over to tell me my time was up, Lemmy waved him away. “No, no, I’m enjoying this,” he said, commandingly. I realised at this point that I had another question I’d been meaning to ask but hadn’t. “Are you scared of anything?” I said to Lemmy. “Nothing,” he replied. Then he paused and frowned for a moment, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him. “Oh, maybe snakes,” he said. “It’s because they’ve got no shoulders.”

I remember all too little of the interviews I did with rock stars when I was briefly employed as the music critic for a national newspaper, but there is this.

Tidal wave of strike action planned for October 23 Plans are under way for a co-ordinated strike across much of the public sector, with nurses, teachers and other public sector workers potentially walking off the job on the same day.

EXC: Plans are underway for a coordinated strike across the public sector on October 23 featuring:
- Nurses
- Teachers
- Doctors
- and more

If the ballots go ahead it could well be the biggest coordinated strike in NZ history

www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

Woohoo! Congratulations!

Bluesky hates art, videos, and anything that isn't a screenshot of a Tweet of some new deranged Tr*mp stuff, but I am going to keep posting my art videos / mini-essays out of a curious mixture of love and pure spite #art

Recapturing the Senior English Curriculum 2024 had been a good year for Stanford. The speed bump that was the outcry over the senior English curriculum and the lack of consultation had been smoothly managed by her, and she was on a roll wi…

Who changed the senior English curriculum just before it went out for consultation?

Why did they erase Māori and Pacific authors and replace them with Shakespeare and 19th century texts?

Some notes on survey weights – Notes from a data witch An area of statistics in which the author is not strong, and really needs to up her game

A few words on survey weights, why I'm embarrassed to have forgotten to take them into account in the past, and how I got lucky because I personally didn't get burned. Not a mistake I intend to repeat in the future

blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

A quiet side street in Ponsonby; exceedingly narrow, lined with old villas and bungalows and parked cars. This was a 30kmh zone, then was forcibly reverted to 50 by the current government. The new 50kmh sign sticks out like a dog’s bollocks.

One of the new 50kmh signs on a side street in Pt Chevalier, where the former 30kmh was forcibly raised by the current government. As indicated by the other signage in the picture, this street is the recommended walking/ biking route to two major local parks. Also, a key access to and from the local retirement village. Talk about mixed messages.

Another classic in Pt Chev: this side street (across from a busy primary school entrance) is 200m long, and the as formerly part of a wider 30kmh area, supported by the community and instrumental in making it safer for kids to walk and bike to school. All of these streets were forcibly reverted to a 50kmh zone by the current government, over immense community objections. The first sign you see as you enter this short dead-end street says “NO EXIT”, and the second is a 50kmh sign reminding you to speed down this narrow cul-de-sac. An especially important reminder (/sarcasm) if you happen to have slowed down to 30kmh for the very brief distance while passing the school gate. The newly shrunken window of safety is now only required on weekdays and only for strict short times at the start and end of the school day - never mind that this school has daily after-hours activities, including a pool heavily used on weekends and during the holidays, and that kids and others and walking and biking through here at all times of the day, all year round).

A few more classic examples of the ludicrous and unfriendly results of Simeon Brown’s* punitive Speed Rule.

*as delivered under his successor as minister of transport, Chris Bishop.

Wow look at this street. There must be incredible productivity gains on this crucial economic route from Simeon Browns blanket speed increases. So safe, and so fitting at 50km/h!

Besides how insulting this is to the hardworking election crew, or how wrong the international comparison is, it ignores a very simple fix: NZ does not have a live progress count after election night. This is why Australian counts feel faster even though they often aren't; we can see results firm up