The hidden power of calendars: history of Oscars told through their telecast schedules

Sundays seem natural for large TV events.  Why wouldn’t they?  NFL’s Super Bowl has been on Sundays forever. It feels like the proper order of things that the Academy Awards ceremony is also on a Sunday. Every year, somewhere near the end of February, start of March.  Yet, a simple dataset of telecast dates points out that this practice is a relatively recent phenomenon and for a long while things were quite different.  For a quick summary of the data, look at the chart below: it shows the progression of the ceremony dates from the most distant (1953) to the closest (2014).  For more details on why the changes occurred, keep reading on.

f1

Read more

FiveThirtyEight’s Riddler #1 – using R to evaluate the answers

Last week a prominent data journalism blog FiveThirtyEight.com has launched The Riddler – a section dedicated to math and probability related puzzles. The deadline for submitting solutions to the first riddle is over and this post will illustrate how you can use R to evaluate potential answers without doing any analytic derivations.

Read more