Using devices such as Jawbone Up, Nike FuelBand and Fitbit, it is now possible to collect a large amount of data about personal activity relatively inexpensively. These type of devices are part of the quantified self movement – a group of enthusiasts who take measurements about themselves regularly to improve their health, to find patterns in their behavior, or because they are tech geeks. One thing that people regularly do is quantify how much of a particular activity they do, but they rarely quantify how well they do it. In this project, your goal will be to use data from accelerometers on the belt, forearm, arm, and dumbell of 6 participants. They were asked to perform barbell lifts correctly and incorrectly in 5 different ways. More information is available from the website here: http://groupware.les.inf.puc-rio.br/har (see the section on the Weight Lifting Exercise Dataset). The goal of this project was to predict the manner in which they did the exercise.

How good are football academies really? The media narrative is usually negative: We are told that, with the influx of TV money into the English game, young players get "too much too soon" and have no ambition. In comparison to their European team-mates, they lack technical ability. And with the influx of foreign players into the national leagues, they have no future. Here I looked at the careers of English footballers born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, I was interested in patterns of drop out and mobility between different leagues of the English football pyramid. I find that, no matter at which league level they start their careers, many 19-21-year-old footballers drop out of football altogether. Additionally, there is significant downward mobility - English youngsters who do stay in the game tend to move down the leagues. This is also true for players starting out at top clubs (e.g. Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea). However, for players who start out at Level 4, the distribution of appearances across the leagues becomes normal, suggesting the training of youngsters at Level 4 matches their potential. I think these results are interesting because they show that there is significant mobility between the leagues. Therefore, players, fans and the media should not judge a player's career by the club or league level he starts out at.

To investigate the effect of vitamin C on tooth growth, Crampton et al. (1947) measured odontoblast length as a function of vitamin C dose in 60 guinea pigs. Two methods of vitamin C delivery were characterised: delivery by orange juice and delivery by ascorbic acid. Here I show that, regardless of delivery method, higher doses of vitamin C lead to increased tooth growth. At low doses of vitamin C, tooth growth is stronger when the vitamin C is delivered by orange juice. The reason for this effect is unclear, but one possible explanation is that absorption of vitamin C by the body is better if vitamin C is delivered by orange juice.

This was the second assignment for the "Reproducible Research" course of the Data Science specialism on coursera. I analysed the impact of natural disasters on the United States using the NOAAstorm database. Specifically, I looked at which types of natural disasters caused the most human and / or economic damage across the United States in the last 60 years. I show that (various types of) floods caused the most economic damage, while (various types of) tornados caused the most human damage and also significant economic damage. These effects are dependent on geography and so vary state by state.