Author: helendatadesign

The US electricity grid is an expansive, complicated system that spans across the United States, and also into Mexico and Canada (see the map for the 2003 East Coast blackout). We can further divide the North American grid into three interconnections: Eastern, Western, and Texas. The Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the grid…

As I write this blog post, it is the middle of 2020 and we’re in the middle of a global pandemic caused by a coronavirus. We anxiously await the release of the vaccine to try to get back to some sense of normalcy. But imagine living one hundred years ago when you needed to worry…

Almost all of us either know about loans or have taken out a loan in our lives.  The premise of a loan is simple:  a sum of money is fronted to the borrower up front for an market price interest rate (at least in theory the market price) for the loan duration.  Over the duration…

No one knew at the start of 2020 that it would become a year unlike any other in modern time. Activities that we previously considered innocuous, like meeting up with friends at a restaurant or attending a large industry conference, suddenly become potential super spreader events. We adjusted our behavior to avoid spreading the disease…

There’s a common misconception out there that we live in a world much worse than we did a century ago. In some ways we do, but it so many more ways we live a much better world. One of the best ways to measure this is through global health numbers. In the last fifty years…

How much does your city spend? Check out the City of Houston expenses and revenue dashboard in Tableau.

Recently, Qantas launched a direct flight between the United Kingdom and Australia by linking up London and Perth (on the west coast of Australia).  It brings one of the biggest goals in aviation of linking up London and Sydney (on the east coast of Australia) directly.  The route has come a long way since as…

There are plenty of actuary jokes out there that play on the stereotypes of those that work in the life insurance field.  Carrying around a calculator or mortality table may seem to be the definition of a joke, but these are actually supplies that actuaries do carry around!  Actuaries are the insurance mathematicians who do…