Adam Olson
Data scientist by day, recovering political scientist by training, Midwesterner the rest of the time.
I spent my twenties studying how Congress makes — or fails to make — laws, and now I spend my days doing data science at Essentia Health. I still think like an academic — a well-specified question, a clean plot, a citation when one's warranted — I just apply it to different problems these days. When I'm not doing that: midwestern sports teams, state parks, and a healthy amount of PBS. Read more on the about page.
Writing
- Animating DW-NOMINATE Scores with gganimateUsing gganimate to show how the ideological distribution of Congress has shifted since World War II.
- Interfacing with SQL in R Using the odbc PackageHow I structure reusable, parameterized R functions for pulling data out of SQL Server with the odbc package.
- Benford's Law and Election FraudA plain-language walkthrough of Benford's Law, and a quick check of whether the 2012 Minnesota U.S. Senate results fit the pattern.
Older writing
Between 2014 and 2019 I wrote a lot about Congress, politics, and academic life. Some of it holds up better than others. It's all still here in the archive.