|
Again from the presidential dataset I am working with... I was interested to see if US presidents have become more self-centered/self-reverential over time (using the frequency of 'me', 'I', and 'my' in each address as a proxy). If anything (see below), the trend is in reverse; there seems to be a gradual decline in the use of the first person singular. Interestingly, only one president, Teddy Roosevelt, avoided use of both 'I' and 'me', all presidents used 'my' at least once, and Obama, Trump (shockingly), Bush Sr., Coolidge, and JFK avoided using 'me'.
In general, presidents' inaugural addresses have more in common with their recent predecessors and immediate successors. Given the rapidly changing human landscape, and the evolution of the English language, it is not surprising that mundane word choice, rather than left/right intellectual persuasion, wins out. Nonetheless, there are some interesting results within shorter time windows (for instance, Obama's inaugurals had more in common with Nixon's & Reagan's than Carter's) .The heat map below shows the cosine similarities of the speeches.
1 Comment
I'm working on a project to capture variation in each president's wikipedia page length- you can find the code here- as well as identifying the linguistic proximity between the wikipedia page and each president's inaugural addresses (hoping to use this proximity as a success measure for each president. i.e. if the themes/language a president chooses for the address closely align with their wiki page, perhaps it is a reflection of the president's stated achievements in the historical record). Anyways, while I am working on that I am also throwing together some graphics. Here is one for birth year and life span (of course, doesn't account for currently living presidents).  I patched together US male life expectancy from a couple of sources, but it is a reasonable approximation. Not surprisingly, presidents have lived considerably longer than the majority of the male population- the only exception being JFK (who is the youngest elected president at 43. Teddy Roosevelt is the youngest serving president- having assumed the office at 42 after the assassination of William McKinley).
I've begun playing with data from the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health for one of my next projects and will be throwing up some graphics as I go through my EDA. The following shows cocaine users (11.6% of the US population has used cocaine) and marijuana users (41.85% of the US population has used marijuana) by the month they first used that drug. They are highly correlated (0.73 Pearson correlation, with only 0.54% of observations in a 100,000 hacker stat permutation test surpassing this value).
With the admitted ignorance of someone who has never studied drug use, my take away looking at the graph above is that there is likely a large overlap in users and/or common seasonal components that drive first consumption. First use for both spikes in June (Summer or end of school celebration?) with a second peak for cocaine in January (investment banker bonus season?) and for marijuana in October (Halloween perhaps?).
|
Categories
All
Archives
November 2018
Please fill in the contact form below to have new articles emailed to you directly!
|
RSS Feed
Proudly powered by Weebly