A version of this article first appeared in the Feb/18 issue of The Capital magazine. Copious amounts of name calling, numerous plot twists, and an ending that — still — doesn’t quite make sense. To the casual observer, the 2016 US presidential election was as strange and as entertaining as…

Earlier this year I started getting into building web scrapers in R to optimise my work, having only used R for rudimentary statistical analysis prior. One of the first challenges was figuring out how to scrape javascript rendered pages using R’s pathetic scraping libraries. Once past that hurdle I was…

Over the past two months, much ink has been spilled regarding the exploits of Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer and their pioneering work with randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Most have been positive, but in spite of the trio’s achievements, naysayers persist. For the uninitiated, an RCT…