Voting Libertarian in Georgia

Where's the hotbed of libertarianism in Georgia? Nowhere, really, but if you rank the counties, it's Athens-Clarke -- home of me (and UGA) that comes out #1. You can see the Top 10  below, with the percent of all votes in 2012 cast for a Libertarian candidate.

1 Clarke 2.4
2 Dade 2.2
3 Murray 2.0
4 Franklin 1.9
5 Catoosa 1.8
6 Lumpkin 1.8
7 Cherokee 1.8
8 Chattooga 1.8
9 Chattahoochee 1.7
10 Rabun 1.7

If you know your geography, you'll recognize many of the counties above tend to be in North Georgia. The map below ranks the counties, darker colors being, of course, more "Libertarian," though this isn't by much, by at best a percentage point or two.

Freshman Data = Popularity?

I was looking at this blog's stats today and, well, the image below will tell you all you need to know. It's of the most popular posts of all time on this blog. Most focus on my scribblings about the infamous Red & Black walkout from 2012. Indeed, five of the top seven most popular posts come from that time.

But look what's hit the Top 10, my post this week about the most popular UGA freshman names. That either says a lot about that post, or how deeply uninteresting everything else is that I've written over the last several years. You pick.

Child Abuse in Georgia

I'm at home recovering from a medical thing, so messing with local data. Below (hopefully) is a map of child abuse in Georgia per 1,000 kids. In other words, it's per capita, so it controls for small versus large counties. As you can see, not a lot of consistency here, except perhaps too many counties around Macon popping out. Click on the map and you can move around. Click on a county and you'll get its rank and rate per 1,000 kids.

What Super Power Do I Want

This the second time I've done this.

A bare, efficient room at Athens Regional Hospital. Someone walks in with a glass of water and a heavy lead container, and then they scurry safely away. I open the container, take out a pill. And swallow it.

Swallow the thing they're running away from. Great.

It's thyroid cancer. They removed the thyroid and cancer cells last year. Also a year ago (and again today) I'm undergoing what's called Radioactive Iodine Ablation. Before the ablation, you go off any iodine in your diet because thyroid cells suck up iodine. And then they give you an iodine pill laced with radioactivity. Any remaining thyroid cells, or potential cancer cells, soak up the iodine and the radioactivity, which kills the remaining cells but doesn't really harm much of anything else.

The super power thing? I'm hoping to get bitten by a spider. More likely it'll be a particularly ugly slug.

Anyway, I have to stay away from people for a few days. What itty bit doesn't get soaked up by thyroid cells has to go somewhere -- and basically that means drinking lots of fluids and getting rid of the excess exactly like you think you have to get rid of the excess. Oh, and flush 2-3 times after each, um, excess. Really it takes a coupla days to get rid of most of it, but you have to sleep alone for 4 days (my dosage) and not share plates or spoons or let people near you.

But ... tomorrow I can go off this stupid iodine-free diet. Again, I can have bread, or dairy, or eggs, or a burger for God's sake.

And if I'm very lucky, this will kill off the remaining cells that seem to be somewhere in my neck, but we can't find them by scanning.

UGA Freshman Names

(update at bottom)

Every year I get the raw data on the first names of UGA's freshman class. Why? Just because. Just in this morning, the 2014 class data.

And the winner is .... Emily.

Again.

In the last seven years, Emily has been the top name among UGA freshmen four times, and it's been the top name four out of the last five years, including 2013 and 2014.

At UGA, if your name is Emily, you're never alone.

The only real competition is Sarah, which ranked #1 in 2008, 2009 and 2012. Semi-fun Sarah fact: the name dropped to 8th in 2010. Note that the two dominate names are female. That's no surprise given the make up of UGA. That, or parents are less creative when it comes to girls names.

There are lots of ways to analyze these data. I pull it together because it makes for a nice classroom exercise for my students to learn spreadsheets, something kinda interesting and they're familiar with.  Ask the data questions, I tell them. Find the story.

If I have time, I'll do some more analyses and maybe create a word cloud of all the freshman names in 2014.  That's often popular.

The Top 10
UGA Frosh Names
of 2014 Class

1. Emily
2. Sarah
3. John
4. William
5. Rachel
6. Anna
7. Katherine
8. Elizabeth
9. Caroline
10. Hannah

UPDATE

Messing with the data a little more.  This freshman class breaks one record -- in the number of different first names. The 2014 freshmen have 1,814 different first names, the highest ever. Now you may say, "But it's a bigger class!" No. The biggest freshman ever at UGA (20111) had 1,733 different names.

What's this mean? I'd like to think it's some indirect, blunt measure of diversity, but to be honest I doubt you can really view the data that way. But -- in 2008, my first year of doing this --- there were only 1,446 different first names. So maybe there's something to it after all. That or people are just getting more creative in how they name their little darlings.

Someone on Twitter responded that these were "white names" (I posted a word cloud and certainly Emily and Sarah, et al., dominate). I'm not sure what's a white versus a non-white name (Biblical names seem to dominate here), and I can only imagine the trouble I'd get in if I wrote about "black names." However, I'm as politically incorrect as it gets, so let's look at one interesting first name case, the ' in a name, as in B'arry, a tendency to naming you often see in the African American community. I see only three in the 2014 list, and I see a whopping 8 back in 2008. I have no idea what that means, if anything, except perhaps a disturbing mid-name punctuation shortage among our newest freshmen.

As an aside, there's not a single Barry in the entire freshman class. Really?

Oh, and that word cloud? See it here or, with luck, see the tweet and visual below.

A "word cloud" of 2014 UGA freshman first names. pic.twitter.com/Xz0bkEn73i
— Barry Hollander (@barryhollander) September 22, 2014

The Big Game

Saturday is a big game for Georgia. The Bulldogs travel to South Carolina to play Steve "Evil Genius" Spurrier's Gamecocks. UGA won its first game, a blowout of a good Clemson team, while South Carolina lost its opening game, a blowout loss to Texas A&M. UGA had a bye last week, while South Carolina played a middling game to beat East Carolina.

Okay, enough with all the proper nouns. What's it all mean?

UGA is a touchdown favorite tomorrow. The fine folks at 538 did a nice piece today on the game. I'm only gonna add something about rankings.

Since 2000, UGA has started the season ranked in the AP Poll's Top 10 six times. Only in three of those seasons, though, did it finish in the Top 10. The most painful, probably, was 2008 when Georgia opened as #1 and finished 13th. Ouch. See the table below for pre-season prediction and final ranking since 2000.

AP Poll on Georgia

Season	Pre-Season Rank	End-of-Season Rank
2014	12	NA, 6th at present
2013	5	*
2012	6	5
2011	19	19
2010	23	*
2009	13	*
2008	1	13
2007	13	2
2006	15	23
2005	13	10
2004	3	7
2003	11	7
2002	8	3
2001	*	22
2000	10	20

* Not in Top 25

Georgia averages a pre-season ranking of about 12th. I say "about" because there's an unranked year, so I called it 28th. It ends with an average of about 16th (there are some rankings in the 30s as finishes). To summarize, UGA averages an AP Poll ranking of 12, and averages an AP Poll finish of 16.

Hopefully this season it'll go in the opposite direction, starting at 14, finishing at ... well ... it's too soon to say.

Why UGA Won't Be in AAU

I wrote yesterday about how UGA (where I profess) would dearly love to be invited to the prom -- in this case, the Association of American Universities, the organization of the top research schools. I predicted an invitation by 2017 that elite group of 62.

I'd like to take that back.

First, there's this story about a couple of schools either nudged out or who left the organization, complaining:

...the metrics the group uses to assess its members define the contributions of high-quality research universities too narrowly, focusing excessively on biomedical research and the volume of federally supported research.

UGA does a good bit of this kind of stuff, but not anywhere near enough given there's no sizeable research medical school located within the university.

Plus, among the list of indicators is how the schools rank in terms of NSF, USDA, and other grant funding. I looked it up. UGA is #83 on one NSF list, #84 on another. I couldn't quickly located other rankings, but I'd expect us to be a bit higher on the USDA stuff, but not so much as to overwhelm the underwhelming ranks in the 80s.

So that 2017 prediction? Never mind.