Home - Interlude One – Interlude One

LLMs as Research Grunts: Surprisingly Useful, Even When They Don’t Get It ‘Right’

So, I teach a course on data visualization here at Lund University. We get our students to wrestle with data, trying to make sense of regional development in Europe using…

How Rare-Earth Element Dependency Threatens the Global Wind Rollout

A couple of weeks back, I read an article in the FT about Ørsted, the big Danish offshore wind developer. Its stock was getting hammered. Part of the story involved project…

Why I would buy stocks in US postcard manufacturers

Navigating the Trade War: Identifying US Companies Positioned for a Domestic Pivot

To say that the landscape of global trade has undergone a dramatic upheaval this week is an understatement. It seems that the current US administration believes in the…

HISCO lookup

This is a post for me to come back to as a refrence. I always need to look up HISCO groups, and I have scraped and stored this information in this github repo but it would…

DRAFT: Analysis for a Solar PV & Battery System (South Africa)

I asked GPT-4.5 with deep research to investigate a solar system for me, in order to test its capabilities, inspired by a post by Timothy B. Lee titled in a somewhat…

Claude 3.7: React and Reactions

One of the best parts of my work as a PhD student is teaching. In a course on regional development in Lund, we cover data visualization and map-making. Both of these are an…

Transit Trek

For a long time, I have had an idea simmering in the back of my mind: could I get a large language model to collect transit data for European airports without me spending…

NeverTooSmall Couch Colours

I really enjoy watching the YouTube channel NeverTooSmall, which showcases cleverly designed small spaces from around the world.

A modern question and answer site: SCB Users Group

A post about creating a question and answer site for users of Statistics Sweden data

Geocoding: two ways

A post about geocoding place names using R and python to access the OSM and Google Maps geocoding APIs.

Transforming National Budget Documents into Queryable Knowledge

A post about automating the data retrieval process from PDF documents using LangChain and the OpenAI API.

The Economics of Instant Hot Water: Quooker vs Kettle

How long will it take for an instant hot water tap to save some money?

Building a YouTube Video Transcript Summarizer (with some help)

A post on what it means to be a data scientist in the age of such capable generative AI.

ChatGPT as translator and text wizard

A post showing how ChatGPT can be used to create structred data from text.

Map projections in R

A post on how to change projections for mapping and save out the new shapefiles.

Electricity generation per capita

A post on electricity generation per capita across the world since 2000.

Our World In Data choropleth

A post on how recreate the Our World In Data characteristic choropleth in R.

ChatGPT cooks me dinner

🍲 Master the kitchen like a pro with the help of ChatGPT! 🍴 I tried it out and the results will blow your mind! 🤯 Find out what happened when I asked a language model for recipe ideas and cooking instructions. 😲 You won’t believe how delicious my Gammon and Vegetable Stew with Mint turned out! 🍽️ Don’t miss out on this must-read blog post! 👀

ChatGPT fills in for me as a blog post author

I ask ChatGPT to write a blog post in the same manner as one I wrote last week. The results will amaze you!

Coefficient plots in `ggplot`

Drawing coefficient plots in R and ggplot.

LinkedIn style tables for personal websites

A post on how to us the {gt} table package to make tables for the about page of a pesonal website or blog.

Programmatically generate tabs in Rmarkdown

A walk-though for writing code that writes it’s own code.

Flavours of cocoa

An exploration of chocolate bar reviews

R vs Python? R & Python!

Mining the twitter archive of Fathom Data

Students Speak

Text analysis of students’ diary entries during the Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa