Chris Kenny, PhD

Thanks Rohan! Hope you’re doing well

Read the preprint here: arxiv.org/pdf/2407.11336

Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors is now forthcoming in the APSR!

We use a game theoretic treatment and continuous DiD(iD) to show when redistricting reforms work

with @corymccartan.com, @simko.bsky.social, Emma Ebowe, Michael Zhao, and Kosuke Imai

Packages 2025 Wrapped – Christopher T. Kenny A look at my R package updates from 2025

My 2025 #rstats wrapped in honor of CRAN reopening for 2026: christophertkenny.com/posts/2026-0...

Fun fact: I made 43 CRAN uploads in 2025 and 41 of them were successful!

Throwback to my favorite #rstats Ripley crashout where he removed a package because a maintainer called him Brian

Some people are fundamentally unkind. It's a shame. The broader R community is incredible and the other CRAN volunteers especially so.

Nothing like starting the day responding to a Brian Ripley hissy fit...

He removes an #rstats package before the scheduled date, gets a bounceback from a *downstream* package, and archives all of the packages...

CRAN volunteers time is the most valuable resource, yet Ripley just loves wasting it

Oh awesome, thank you both. I had looked for this a few weeks ago and didn’t see an option

Glad we have LLMs in everything so that GitHub tries to create commit messages like this... Just makes more work by having to delete the message to write in a correct one instead of just writing the correct one in the first place

Is there an #rstats best practices for including a shiny app in an R package? I see mastering-shiny.org/scaling-pack... by @hadley.nz and github.com/daattali/ddpcr by Dean Attali (couldn't find his handle!) - just curious on understanding best practices, bunding data, app, and the www folder etc.

@corymccartan.com and I have been playing with @paleolimbot.bsky.social's #rstats `libgeos` package. It's pretty awesome.

Handles the hard parts so that you can connect Rcpp to GEOS with a few lines of code. Got some existing, optimized `geos` code to ~3x faster!

paleolimbot.github.io/libgeos/

Oh awesome, thanks for sharing. Kieran Healy is always doing awesome work. Not shocked that he did this first!

A dot density map of NYC where each point represents 50 voters. Lines show NYC neighborhoods. Density is highest in Manhattan with a lot of dots for Mamdani. Areas of Staten Island and Brooklyn are dense and yellow for Cuomo.

NYC 2025 Mayoral results as a dot density plot using the `dots` #rstats package (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...)

GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

Support for Prop 50 in California is highly correlated with support for Harris in 2024 and even runs slightly ahead of her

A sad day for democracy to have the future of competitive elections literally on the ballot and yet be so utterly defeated.

Stands at 63.9% voting yes.

Thanks for sharing!

How to Analyze bluesky Posts and Trends with R - Storybench If all you're doing on bluesky is scrolling, liking and posting, then you're riding a bike with training wheels. Here are simple tools using its open-source skeleton.

There are a lot of great posts out there that aren't very highly ranked.

Don't rely on bluesky to find you great content; you can find it on your own! Here's how:

#Rstats via @northeasternu.bsky.social's Storybench

www.storybench.org/how-to-analy...

Yeah and once you start adding known precinct covariate, the possibilities really explode. We ended up with several internal (quarto) dashboards to handle plotting everything on the fly

2025 NYC Mayoral Race by Neighborhood CBS News estimates of how different parts of the city voted

NYC map shaded by vote margin!

We collected very granular precinct data and aggregated it to neighborhoods people actually recognize

Bushwick, Flushing, Upper West Side, etc.

datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Wrd72/

H/T @mitelectionlab.bsky.social @chriskenny.bsky.social @corymccartan.com @simko.bsky.social

For the on-air presenting and digital media, we also built a live neighborhood map: www.cbsnews.com/news/nyc-may... (now filled by margin!)

Here at the CBS News data desk with @chriskenny.bsky.social and @simko.bsky.social! Looking at the VA numbers

Finishing up prep for election night at CBS News' Data Desk!

Sunday in NYC was the highest single day early votes since at least 2019 and maybe ever:

Tracking the early vote in NYC. Turnout in Manhattan is particularly striking. Brooklyn is higher in raw numbers, but Manhattan is tracking closer to a presidential year than the odd years.

typr: Write and Render 'Typst' Documents Compile 'Typst' files using the 'typst-cli' (&lt;<a href="https://typst.app" target="_top">https://typst.app</a>&gt;) command line tool. Automatically falls back to rendering via embedded 'Typst' from...

This looks great. You might also appreciate typr: cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

As a member of the (now disbanded) National Academy of Sciences working group on differential privacy I can report some liberals want it gone, too, as its application tends to hurt disadvantaged communities

In my experience and conversations, most academics want it gone too.

The parameter values necessary to make the data usable make the theoretical guarantees functionally useless. Better off using an empirically effective approach, like swapping.

DP is a cute idea, but it’s a bad fit for the census

Should also add thanks to @resulumit.bsky.social for opening issues and pull requests! Feedback is always helpful, especially in broad packages where I’m not using every single feature

#rstats bskyr is updated on CRAN with lots of fixes and new features. Major additions are detailed vignettes support for direct messaging.

Full list: christophertkenny.com/bskyr/news/

tinytiger ("Lightweight Interface to TIGER/Line Shapefiles") is now updated on CRAN to include support for 2025 census shape boundaries! #rstats

Package website: alarm-redist.org/tinytiger/

On Monday, I taught an intro to #Quarto #quartopub workshop aimed at social scientists at Princeton. Slides and demos are publicly available here: github.com/christopherk...