Piketty in R markdown – we need some help from the crowd by Jeff Leek.
From the post:
Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century was a surprise best seller and the subject of intense scrutiny. A few weeks ago the Financial Times claimed that the analysis was riddled with errors, leading to a firestorm of discussion. A few days ago the London School of economics posted a similar call to make the data open and machine readable saying.
None of this data is explicitly open for everyone to reuse, clearly licenced and in machine-readable formats.
A few friends of Simply Stats had started on a project to translate his work from the excel files where the original analysis resides into R. The people that helped were Alyssa Frazee, Aaron Fisher, Bruce Swihart, Abhinav Nellore, Hector Corrada Bravo, John Muschelli, and me. We haven’t finished translating all chapters, so we are asking anyone who is interested to help contribute to translating the book’s technical appendices into R markdown documents. If you are interested, please send pull requests to the gh-pages branch of this Github repo.
Hmmm, debate to be conducted based on known data sets?
That sounds like a radical departure from most public debates, to say nothing of debates in politics.
Dangerous because the general public may come to expect news reports, government budgets, documents, etc. to be accompanied by machine readable data files.
Even more dangerous if data files are compared to other data files, for consistency, etc.
No time to start like the present. Think about helping with the Piketty materials.
You may be helping to start a trend.