Methodology
8 articles
What Happens When You Measure Crime Where People Actually Live?
What happens when you swap county averages for neighborhood data? A 22-fold range in crime rates emerges.
Why Claude and ChatGPT Struggle with Research Graphics (And What Makes Antigravity Prompts Work)
Stack Overflow has accumulated 72,879 questions tagged matplotlib and another 57,712 tagged ggplot2. Reddit's r/dataisbeautiful (21 million subscribers) fields daily requests for help positioning legends, adjusting axis labels, and fixing overlapping annotations. The collective effort spent on research graphics is staggering, and much of it addresses the same fundamental problem: code can't see what it produces. When we use Claude to generate Python visualizations, we often spend hours fighting
Scaling Up: From 7 Counties to Statewide
Expanding from 2,000 to 9,039 census tracts reveals what scales linearly (Census API, KD-trees) and what requires adaptation (transit aggregation, memory management). Here's what the statewide data shows that county-level analysis missed.
Building a Better Metric: The Residualized Accessibility Index
81% of county-level variation in food security vulnerability is explained by income, density, and car ownership. Here's how residualization separates structural factors from potential policy effects.
Why County Rankings Confound Policy with Context
Merced County's vulnerability index is 2.3 times higher than San Francisco's. But before drawing policy conclusions, we need to understand what that number actually measures.
The Retail Density Paradox: Why More Stores Mean Worse Data
Developing a verification methodology for EBT acceptance across 7,000 California food retailers
From Methods Paragraph to Working Pipeline: AI-Assisted Implementation
A well-written methodology section is almost executable code. The gap between describing a procedure and implementing it has narrowed dramatically with agent-based coding tools.
Beyond Demographics: How Neighborhood-Level Intersections Predict Food Security Vulnerability
When measuring neighborhood food security vulnerability, single demographic factors don't tell the full story. We built and validated an index that shows how intersecting identities create compounding risk.