I was recently reading Hacker News and noticed a post linking to the USCIS H1-B data repository, which contains information on the H1-B Visa applications process and statistics about visa submission, approval, and rejection by Citizen and Immigration Services.

As a bit of background, the H1-B visa program was created to allow US employers to employ foreign nationals in jobs requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s or master’s degree. H1-B visas must be sponsored by an employer, and are typically valid for 3 - 6 years. While there is a cap of 65,000 visas that can be awarded each year, there are a number of exemptions for research institutions, particular countries of origin, and rollover between years that make the practical number of visas available much higher. Furthermore, there are 20,000 H1-B visas available to individuals who possess a master’s degree or higher from an American university. This means the total number of H1-B visas available in the lottery is in the 150,000 - 200,000 / year range, for both initial and continuing visas.

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Given Major League Baseball’s status as the only major American sports league without a salary cap, I’m always interested in seeing how teams choose to allocate their resources every year. There’s a lot that plays into how much any given team will spend on their roster, depending on everything from how badly a team is looking to compete, the proportion of their production coming from young players vs older players, how their local cable TV deals are looking, and how much of a dip each team takes in that season’s free agent market.

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With March Madness right around the corner, I thought it would be fun to visualize a bit of data about each region and team, with the end goal of being a bit better informed for filling out my bracket! The data below is mostly drawn from Ken Pomeroy’s college basketball rankings, and is intended to give a brief overview of the teams and regions in this year’s tournament.

Comparing Regions

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After writing my recent article about Bryce Harper’s signing with the Phillies, I started getting really excited about the return of baseball! With Spring Training in full swing and most free agents signed and with their teams, we can start to look at how each team projects to perform in the 2019 season. As a big Washington Nationals fan, my attention naturally gravitated to the NL East. Take a look below to see how each team in the division projects to stack up!

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Charting LeBron

LeBron James passed Michael Jordan tonight on the NBA’s all time points scored leaderboard, surpassing MJ’s 32,292 career points to vault him into 4th place. While this season has largely been one to forget for the Lakers, LeBron’s pursuit of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the possible arrival of Anthony Davis or a second star guarantee that there will be lots of excitement in LA for the next few seasons.

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One of the interesting facts that I’ve learned as I continue to settle down in Santa Monica is that since May of 2015, the City of Santa Monica has effectively banned short-term home/vacation rentals. This decision was made with an eye to AirBnB and other online leasing platforms, and with the intention that Santa Monica’s few apartment buildings not turn into de-facto hotels with new people in and out every weekend. As an alternative, the City has launched a “home-sharing” program which allows homeowners who register to host a visitor in their home for up to 30 days, as long as the resident is also living there concurrently.

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Now that Bryce Harper has officially signed with the Philadelphia Phillies on a 13 year, $330M megadeal, it’s interesting to conduct a retrospective look at the different offers he had on the table when making his decision. There has been a lot of publicity in recent hours about the amount of deferred money which the Nationals including in their “10 year, $300M offer”, especially compared to the Phillies deal which included no deferred money at all and also pays a $20M signing bonus. Furthermore, there’s even news that the Giants and Dodgers tried to splash the pot at the end with interesting offers of their own.

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One of my favorite posts from last year was about NBA Rim Protection. In that post, I created a statistic sitting on top of other rim defense statistics called RIMD. While you can check out the old post for additional detail on the statistic itself the bottom line is that RIMD is a weighted efficiency statistic that seeks to measure how effectively players can defend shots at the rim. The stat is designed to give preference to those who effectively contest a large volume of shots each game (DFGA) while holding shooters to a lower shooting percentage on those shots than their season average (DIFF%).

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If you haven’t heard of it before, the Big Mac Index is a heuristic invented by The Economist to estimate purchasing power parity across economies. Looking past the numbers-to-numbers layer of exchange rates, the Big Mac Index is focused on measuring the cost of a single, standardized item (voila, the Big Mac!) across countries, and examining where the burger is relatively expensive and inexpensive compared to the rest of the world.

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No real story here - just wanted to make some fun airline maps! The graphics you’ll see below were created by mapping hub airports for each major US air carrier and then showing flight traffic to and from all other major flight hubs. Cities are sized by the relative passenger volume of all connecting flights through that destination.

I’ve (tried to) follow each airline’s brand guides for color and styling on each map. Some, like American and Virgin, turned out great, while other color palettes like United and Southwest didn’t map as well to a two-color format… 🤷‍♂️

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