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andrew.heiss.phd
Andrew Heiss
@andrew.heiss.phd
18K followers 3.9K following 4.3K posts
Assistant professor at Georgia State University, formerly at BYU. 6 kids. Study NGOs, human rights, #PublicPolicy, #Nonprofits, #Dataviz, #CausalInference.

#rstats forever.

andrewheiss.com

Signal: andrewheiss.01
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andrew.heiss.phd
heck yes French toast sticks #poliscicooks #pacooks
Deep fried French toast sticks
November 10, 2025 at 10:29 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
lololol dug up this tweet from my archive from almost 8 years ago of my very first sourdough loaf—I've definitely gotten better at this
Tweet from January 16, 2017 showing a nearly completely flat loaf of sourdough bread
November 10, 2025 at 3:37 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
weekend bread #pacooks #poliscicooks #breadsky

(not pictured: a now-consumed rosemary focaccia)
Four loaves of sourdough: two rustic bâtards and two ultra soft sandwich loaves
November 10, 2025 at 3:18 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
whoa this is a wild drop

(Celsius in alt text)
Three day forecast showing that the high is going from 75 F/24 C to 67 F/19 C to 41 F/5C
November 9, 2025 at 1:44 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
holy moly that’s a ton of cancellations (mine is delayed by an hour but still happening apparently)
Departures board at DCA with maybe 30-40% of flights cancelled and the rest delayed
November 7, 2025 at 10:28 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
And it's trivial to switch to bars too (code here too gist.github.com/andrewheiss/...)
Same warming stripes, but shown as bars that go negative or positive and are filled with blue and red
November 7, 2025 at 10:15 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Have you ever wanted to make your own climate warming stripes plot? It's super easy with #rstats! (code here gist.github.com/andrewheiss/... )
Blue and red stripes showing temperature anomalies since 1850
November 7, 2025 at 10:14 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Got to spend the past 1.5 days at a really neat workshop w/40+ scholars and civil society leaders hosted by the @carnegieendowment.org and @bridgingthegap.bsky.social on closing civic space and NGO restrictions
The Carnegie Endowment’s building in DC
November 7, 2025 at 6:35 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
this is just statistical error and is because Adipose Georg, who lives in cave & loses 100 billion pounds, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
An adipose from Doctor Who
November 6, 2025 at 6:18 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
flying to dc and oh no
We apologize that your flight is delayed. Explore available flight options with in-app trip support.
November 6, 2025 at 3:12 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Voted!
A Georgia “I voted” sticker
November 4, 2025 at 6:12 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
The {sf} package continues to blow my mind with how easy it is to make maps with #rstats and ggplot (code for that map here gist.github.com/andrewheiss/...)
Map showing points in Utah, North Carolina, Georgia, Jordan, Italy, and Egypt, with great circle paths plotted between them
November 4, 2025 at 1:34 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
*Also* she discovered a loophole for the no-drinking-water-before-bed rule
Three-year-old girl licking an ice cube from a plate
November 4, 2025 at 4:09 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
The 3-yo can’t finish a lollipop in one sitting so we tell her to save it in a bowl.

Just found this. She’s been adding it and taking licks from it throughout the day, like a lollipop buffet.
Bowl with 7 opened and licked lollipops, 1 unopened lollipop, and two Swedish fish
November 4, 2025 at 4:02 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
Helpful tiny Positron extenion I just found today: Open in New Window open-vsx.org/extension/zo...

It, um, opens things from the Explorer pane in a new window. Super helpful if you have a project with other projects inside.
Explorer pane in Positron showing a right-click menu with an "Open in New Window" option selected
November 3, 2025 at 2:57 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class. I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you. It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents. NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning. In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work. I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this: (a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder) At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map. Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.” That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!) Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already. It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it. I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here. I’m concerned that it’s not real data. It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal. None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.
November 2, 2025 at 10:17 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
me vicariously following game 7 through everyone’s posts here, thinking both teams are neat
Marge Simpson saying “Can’t I just bet that all the player will have a fun time?”
November 2, 2025 at 12:15 AM
andrew.heiss.phd
Mamdani with a bodega cat saying “izayyak ya basha”
November 1, 2025 at 11:28 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
h*ck yeah pumpkin challah french toast #poliscicooks #pacooks
A stack of French toast French toast on a plate with sausage and buttermilk syrup and whipped cream
October 28, 2025 at 9:03 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Massive challah for French toast tonight (first time trying the King Arthur recipe instead of my standard NYT one—hopefully it worked!) #poliscicooks #pacooks #breadsky
Two huge loaves of 4-strand challah with black sesame seeds and poppy seeds
October 28, 2025 at 6:19 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
More evidence supporting this really neat paper doi.org/10.1111/ajps... (JSTOR version: www.jstor.org/stable/45295...)
Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina Adam Scharpf, Christian Gläßel American Journal of Political Science Volume 64, Issue 4 October 2020 Pages 791-806 Abstract Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975–83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown.
October 23, 2025 at 2:21 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Here are the onboarding todos once they join - they have to introduce themselves, practice responding a question in help-me, and post a recipe to a channel. It's helpful for getting them used to navigating the server
New Member To Do's Introduce yourself! Respond to the "Example Question" in the #help-me channel Do what the end of the syllabus tells you to do!
October 22, 2025 at 9:27 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
I make it a community server so that it has cool features like this forum-like help-me channel + a bunch of other useful default channels, and it works really well (especially for R stuff, since it supports markdown and you can get syntax highlighting with ```r code areas)
Screenshot from Discord showing a class server with a forum channel with different questions + channels for general, neat-things, bragging, recipes, and introductions
October 22, 2025 at 9:21 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
Yeah, they either join the server with their existing account or make a new account if they don't have one. I ask them to use their real name as their nickname just for this one server (so we don't get weird gaming ones), and I have a bunch of onboarding tasks, like "ask a question in #help-me"
Discord server rules: Be respectful and kind, and strive to help others Use your real name as your server nickname (ask Dr. Heiss if you need help!) No spammy advertising, sharing explicit content, or harassment of any kind)
October 22, 2025 at 9:21 PM
andrew.heiss.phd
woohoo this was super easy to do for course website Nº2 #QuartoPub - now I'm finally in compliance with Georgia rules

PDF: datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/PMAP-8551-HE...
Site: datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com
Code: github.com/andrewheiss/...
Screenshot of a PDF of a syllabus built with Typst based on a Quarto markdown file - see the website link for the full content
October 22, 2025 at 8:20 PM