Blog: 2012

In Part I, we showed how to plot a time series of the change in American beards over time, using a dataset from Robert Hyndman's time series data library.  Today, we're going to look at whether the dramatic changes in American male beardfulness seem related to the economy.  Did Americans grow recession beards in response to the Panic of 1873?  Out of work, did they forgo their frequent trips to the barber (since Gillette didn't invent the personal safety razor until 1904 so they could do it themselves)?  Did they go on their job interviews with a face full of mutton chops and just never get called back (by telegram)?

What you'll learn

• How to apply recession shading, according to the NBER's recession dates, to a time series---easily.
• How to change the color of the recession shading
• Whether 19th century gentlemen grew recession beards after losing their jobs in algo trading, you know, just taking some time off to study graphic design for a little bit.

If you use R for time series analysis, chances are you've used Robert J. Hyndman's excellent forecast tools.  I recently stumbled on his time series data library where I found just the data set I've been looking for to show some R time series plotting tricks:

http://robjhyndman.com/tsdldata/roberts/beards.dat

It's the percentage of American men with full beards reported annually.  Nothing serious here, but absurdly perfect for a set of posts to share a couple things that took me a while to learn when plotting in R.

What you'll learn

• How to grab data from a plaintext source on the web, stripping header information
• How to convert a list of data with a known start time and end time into an xts time series object
• How to convert xts to a data.frame for plotting in ggplot2
• Aesthetics for red data points with dotted line interpolation
• How much American beardfulness there was in the late 19th century and early 20th.

Mentioned near the end, Reuters picked up our ECN launch last week: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/09/finance-crowdfunding-idUSL5E8G50RB20120509

This is a project I'm pleased to have worked on with the Loft Finance team: http://europecrowdfunding.org/ The European Crowdfunding Network launched last week.  Its mission is to provide the groundwork for founding a European-wide Crowdfunding Association for funding startups and small businesses---using the power of P2P to get new ventures up and running.