Background

I’m Will May. I started writing code and doing statistics as a hobby in 2010, focusing on roll call scaling political ideology models. These days I get paid to do statistics and programming for atmospheric scientists. I’ve also worked with researchers examining e-petition data. My academic background is in economics and statistics.

For about 5 years, I tried to overthrow the government – peacefully, thank god – with Free Keene, a group I don’t recommend joining. If I write too much about libertarians sometimes, that’s why.

Software

dwnominate: A convenient R interface to the DW-NOMINATE roll call scaling model.

ipas: A python implementation of the Ice Particle and Aggregate Simulator originally created in IDL by Carl Schmitt. Closed source for now, sorry.

leaflet-layerArray: Organize and control arrays of map layers. Useful for displaying time series of maps.

Research

Przybylo, Vanessa M., Kara J. Sulia, Carl G. Schmitt, Zachary J. Lebo, and William C. May. 2019. “The Ice Particle and Aggregate Simulator (IPAS). Part I: Extracting Dimensional Properties of IceIce Aggregates for Microphysical Parameterization.” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 76 (6): 1661–76. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-18-0187.1.

Hagen, Loni, Teresa M. Harrison, Özlem Uzuner, William May, Tim Fake, and Satya Katragadda. 2016. “E-Petition Popularity: Do Linguistic and Semantic Factors Matter?” Government Information Quarterly 33 (4): 783–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.07.006.

Harrison, Teresa M., Catherine Dumas, Nic DePaula, Tim Fake, Will May, Akanksha Atrey, Jooyeon Lee, Lokesh Rishi, and S. S. Ravi. 2017. “E-Petitioning and Online Media: The Case of #BringBackOurGirls.” In Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 11–20. Dg.o ’17. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3085228.3085320.