Hi, I'm Jan - an environmental scientist by trade and a toilet geek at heart. I am currently based in Bristol, UK, and am interested in nature-based solutions to water and wastewater management and sustainable, blue-green technologies to make our built environment climate-adapted and water-resilient in light of the progressing climate crisis. I love to look at the world through the lens of data-driven approaches to gain insights otherwise hidden in plain sight. Here, I blog about some my work and interests on environmental issues, water and sanitation, the climate crisis, zero waste living, and data science using the progrsamming language R as my favorite tool.

Safe the New Internationalist's stories! Using webscraping and word clouds to see why independent journalism is worth protecting!

2021-05-26

For nearly 50 years, the UK-based independent magazine New Internationalist is bringing us impactful, global stories from voices often unheard. The magazine is dedicated to socially conscious journalism and publishing and is now inviting the public to support their mission and become one of their co-owners. In this short post, I will be looking at the topics covered in the New Internationalist by scraping their website for article titles of past issues and visualizing the results in a word cloud, all using R.

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When is it safe to plant your seedlings outside? Or: Should you consult the Saints or trust the data?

2021-05-22

Over the last couple of weeks, we kept asking ourselves when would be the best time to transplant our seedlings out into the garden? We wanted to make sure that they’d be safe from night frost, but a warm spell in late April or early May might still be followed by some cold nights (here in Germany at least). Luckily, popular folklore provides us with the wisdom of the Ice Saints, a fixed range of (name) days in mid-May after which no frost is to be expected. Let’s use the powers of R to check if the Saints can be trusted!

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Gender balance in the Irish elections a.k.a. an excellent excuse to learn how to create stacked point plots and butterfly plots in R!

2020-02-24

With the most recent Irish General Election having concluded last month, I got interested in looking at some of the available data and trying to see how they could be visualized with R. Here, we’ll have a look on how to use stacked dot plots and butterfly plots to show gender balance among running and elected candidates by party and constituency.

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Sanitation in peri-urban areas

2018-02-14

With an ever-increasing number of people living in urban areas globally, cities and their surroundings, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are facing increasing challenges to meet the demand for basic needs services, such as housing, food and water, education, healthcare, and sanitation services. Innovative, non-traditional approaches are needed to cope with the challenges resulting from rapid urbanisation and population growth in the water and sanitation sector.

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