Category: Data Analytics and AI

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Identifying skills-based occupational transition pathways with the O*NET

This post estimates potential labor market transition pathways based on the similarity of skills, abilities and knowledge required by occupations. The approach broadly follows Bratanova et al. (2026). Like their research, the considered transition pathways are for workers currently employed as truck drivers. Unlike their approach, we've used a more recent version of the O*NET database and a different SOC-to-ANZSCO crosswalk. Although the point wasn't to precisely replicate their results, our approach largely did, with differences in similarity scores likely stemming from our different mapping of the SOC to the ANZSCO rather than from the method itself.

The boring part first: Building a crosswalk from O*NET-SOC to ANZSCO

There's no official crosswalk between the ONET's occupational taxonomy and ANZSCO, which is awkward, because Australian researchers use ONET data all the time. This post builds one, explains why you should be suspicious of relying on it and then suggests a better methodology is probably what was applied by the European Commission.

Institutions Are a Package Deal: What a Correlation Can’t Tell You About the Rule of Law

This post asks how institutions should be conceptualized and analyzed: can the rule of law (and other institutions) sensibly be examined one at a time, or do they need to be treated as parts of an interdependent system?

Level With Me: Can the WGI Predict the WJP’s Rule of Law Scores?

The first post established that the WGI and WJP rule of law measures agree on how they rank countries. This follow-up tests the stricter question of whether the WGI can predict the WJP’s levels, rather than just the relative ranking / relative position of countries. It can: forecasting errors appear to be minimal and don’t vary significantly over time.

Close Enough? Using the WGI as a Proxy for the WJP Rule of Law Index

This post examines whether the Worldwide Governance Indicators' (WGI) rule of law measure provides a reasonable proxy for the World Justice Project's (WJP) Rule of Law Index, such as when analysis might benefit from the WGI's availability for more countries over a longer period. Results suggest the two measures broadly agree with one another when making cross-country comparisons, but care is warranted for country-level estimates where it's likely to be more difficult to differentiate measurement noise from genuine changes in the quality of institutions.

Running local LLMs on your NPU from R with Foundry Local and ellmer

This post summarizes how I was able to leverage my Surface Pro 11's Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to chat with Large Language Models (LLMs) from R (for some reason).

Using science to find the best decaf

To test whether my wife and I could tell the difference between decaf and caffeinated coffee, I conducted a highly scientific double-blind taste test (subject to funding constraints).

India’s 2015 National Classification of Occupations Data File

One of the outputs from a project I worked on in 2025 was a data file of India's 2015 National Classification of Occupations. The

Calculating the United State’s ‘reciprocal’ tariffs

This post provides R code that reproduces the ‘reciprocal’ tariffs imposed by the US. in early 2025.

From code to conversation: Localized AI fun with LM Studio and the ellmer package

Summary: in this post I demonstrate how you can interact with locally hosted LLM models in R using the ellmer package and LM Studio.