Chris Kenny, PhD

@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...

As with past SCOTUS oral arguments on redistricting, here's a word cloud in the shape of the state (with stopwords and lawyer names removed):

Thanks. mapgl makes it much faster and removes some of the hacky components that were needed to get leaflet to avoid redrawing shapes. Appreciate your package!

Interactive Redistricting A point and click editor for districts built on shiny and mapgl. Users can draw districts and calculate standard redistricting metrics, like compactness or the number of administrative splits. Maps ca...

The code to make the demo is simple, especially if you already use ALARM data:

library(redistio)
nm <- alarmdata::alarm_50state_map('NM')
draw(nm, init_plan = nm$cd_2020, palette = wacolors::wacolors$rainier,
layers = list(County = 'county'))

More info: christophertkenny.com/redistio/

redistio now uses @kylewalker.bsky.social's mapgl for interactive redistricting map editing!

redistio is an #rstats package that uses Shiny to draw redistricting maps locally.

Unlike other district editors, this provides access to our simulation algorithms, interactively!

Short demo:

#rstats packages tinytiger and baf may again be seeing intermittent issues (again), as the Census Bureau has placed this redirect on their FTP sites.

Empty list responses may also be possible, as the download is (sometimes) capturing the HTML page...

A pdf version of the slides are here: christophertkenny.com/drafts/2025-...

Presenting today!

Search — Typst: Universe Explore packages and templates to take your documents to the next level.

There’s been a lot of development, especially with the growth in the user community over that time period. But it would depend on how obscure your math is, I think.

There’s a listing of community packages here: typst.app/universe/sea...

Yeah, I have fair point. I do all of my journal writing in Quarto, so that I can swap between formats, which lets me write Quarto => Typst. If a journal requires LaTeX, you just swap the engine and Quarto produces the LaTeX file.