R on Niklas Lange

Grade Inflation in Scotland

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This piece was written for the Strathclyde Telegraph; what follows is the first draft, which I put together over about a week and posted here while the final version went through editing.

Scottish Highers have been a crucial component of university applications for decades, and published results run back to 2009. Given recent economic inflation, this correspondent was curious whether a similar trend exists in Scottish education. Analysing the data published on Scottish Highers reveals some intriguing trends.

Strathclyde's Changing Demographics

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of journalism — The Economist in particular — so I thought it would be fun to try a bit of data journalism of my own and pitch it to my university newspaper. I started by looking into the demographics of the University of Strathclyde; what follows is a short report on what changed.

Over the years Strathclyde has been through a lot: Brexit, Covid and strikes may all have left a mark on the university’s make-up and capacity. This report goes to the data to see which trends actually show up.

A Two-Year Web Scraping Pipeline

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

This project implements an end-to-end pipeline to collect, store, and visualize publicly available video-ranking data from a major online video platform. The aim was to explore geographic differences in popularity, track trends over different time windows (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, all-time), and build a robust system that runs on a schedule with monitoring and backups.

Note: the project only collected information that is publicly visible on the site, and used rate limiting and scheduling safeguards to avoid putting load on it. See the Ethics, legal & safety section below for the precautions taken. The pipeline was retired in August 2025, after changes to the site cut the amount of usable data — and the insight that could be drawn from it — significantly.