Lebanon shouldering Syria

The crisis that is Syria has had an incredible regional affect geopolitically, economically, and has required a significant response in humanitarian aid.  As the mass evacuation has occurred, surrounding countries are found hosting thousands of people, many of them children.  The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) has setup an inter-agency portal for tracking where refugees are going in the region.  Keep in mind, these people they are tracking are those that have registered with the UN.  It's safe to assume for one reason or another that many people in fact do not register.  Those that have registered and the approximate number of those that haven't total the "Total Persons of Concern" figure that the UNHCR puts out.  Below is a map that shows the "Total Persons of Concern" number with the number of persons indicated by the circle size in each city they are located.

You may notice that Turkey hosts the most refugees in one location, albeit there are many different camps in Turkey but that is not portrayed on the UNHCR website.  The camps hosting the refugees vary in their funding, some from the UN and some from the country itself.  Refugees in Lebanon seem to be hosted in four different cities as indicated by the UNHCR.  Lebanon also hosts the most Syrian refugees out of any country.

A couple remarkable things about the Lebanon's role with Syrian refugees.  First, the country itself has just over 4 million people.  Again, according to the numbers retrieved from UNHCR, there are about 1 million Syrian refugees (persons of concern) living in Lebanon.  That means 1 in 4 people in Lebanon are Syrian refugees.  Let's look at these numbers a different way and consider comparable US cities (just so we can have a comparison to understand the gravity of these numbers).

Keep in mind all the different needs for these populations in the US.  Then imagine facilitating these needs in refugee camps...simply staggering.  

Most Entertaining NBA Teams

In a previous post I highlighted the Thunder keeping more of their games closer (within 3 points) than anyone else in the NBA.  As the season has progressed, this has changed.  The Thunder are still in the top five of most close games as of 2/19/2014, but the Mavericks, Warriors, and Hawks have more.  If a game is close, by itself that doesn't say necessarily much about either team that was in the match-up or that their match-up is particularly good.  This isn't necessarily indicative of the ability of teams (more close games=better team or vice versa), but I think it does indicate entertainment value of the games or stress incurred by fans.  Below is a bar graph showing each team and how many games they have had that ended with each team being within 3 or less points.

The network below shows who the match-ups were with.  Again, the Pacers having only 3 games within 3 points isn't indicative of their current No. 2 rank at 41-13.

Here I'll propose a metric that attempts to capture the entertainment value of the games a team plays, with a few assumptions:  we are more entertained the more teams win and close games are fun to watch.  Below shows a graph with close games against total wins of a team.  The points are sized according to a "team entertainment" metric or (No. Close Games/Season Losses).  This communicates a team's ability to win as well as to provide entertaining games along the way (close games being entertaining).

The Thunder rank the highest on this metric with the Trail Blazers, Heat, Warriors, and Mavericks also ranking high.  Arguably, this makes the Thunder the most entertaining team to watch...at least this far in the season.

State of the Union Speech Comparison

The State of the Union is historically a speech used to set the tone for the year...at least I think that's what it is.  The process of writing these speeches has been discussed before and first-hand detail is available in this article.  I was interested in seeing the difference in language between the 2013 and 2014 State of the Union address in terms of what was said.  A lot was said in each speech so I narrowed it down to words that were mentioned 20 times total in the two speeches.  Below is a wordcloud showing these words, with the larger words having a higher frequency.

You can see just from this wordcloud how these speeches seem to take a more emphatic/determined/action-oriented tone with the word "will" having the highest frequency (aside from another word we will see below).  Also, you can get an idea of some of the policy issues he discussed.

As noted before, I wanted to compare the two speeches to see which words were being used more/less when comparing the two.  The number of times a word is mentioned in the 2013 State of the Union address is on the X-axis and the 2014 address is on the Y-axis.

Probably one of the odder yet clearer takeaways from this graph is the applause given in 2014 vs 2013 (in the speech text this appears when there is pause for applause also for cheers).  The President went into this speech having a very low approval rating.  That being said, was the applause a function his party knowing his lack-luster rating?  Or was it just that the speech was better and elicited much more applause than last year?  It is interesting that this year's speech received more than 10 additional pauses for applause than 2013.  "Jobs" was used more last year in the speech than this year whereas "help" was used more this year.  This may reflect some of the policy decisions with the Affordable Healthcare Act having been past and other programs intended to provide "help" for Americans.   Last year after the election jobs and employment were a large part of what worried many Americans (and for many still does).  "Energy" was mentioned much less in this year's SOTU.  Perhaps the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline influenced the topic of energy as a priority in the speech this year.  Many of the words were also very linear in their use (seen clustered around 10).

Context is certainly important in speeches and this technique of comparing words by no means completely depicts what is important or how things were communicated.  However, the words that are chosen for these speeches are strategic and outline (if not in function than in form) the year for the president and his priorities.