This is a SQL-based introduction to the data and analysis behind the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-winning “Medicare Unmasked” investigative project. It also doubles as a helpful guide if you’re attempting the midterm based on the WSJ Medicare’s investigation.
To follow along in this walkthrough, you can download my SQLite database here:
medicare_providers_2012.sqlite.zip Be warned: it is nearly 700MB zipped and expands to more than 2 gigabytes.
When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.
Source: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site
The question is, how do you find fakes in a sea of data? Answering that becomes more difficult when you consider that even real users of Ashley Madison were probably giving fake information at least some of the time. But wholesale fakery still leaves its traces in the profile data. I spoke with a data scientist who studies populations, who told me to compare the male and female profiles in aggregate, and look for anomalous patterns.
Beyond that, once an entire corpus of work has been analysed in this way, it becomes possible to compare them in unprecedented depth and detail. For example, Mohammad has analysed all of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and arranged them in order of negative word density. The darkest turns out to be a tale called Gambling Hansel.
The following list of data sources has been modified as of 8/19/13. Most of the data sets listed below are free, however, some are not.
via Finding Data on the Internet | inside-R | A Community Site for R.
Storm-induced seismic vibes aren’t a newly recognized phenomenon. In 2005, ground motions triggered by Hurricane Katrina were picked up by seismometers in California. And even storms that remain far from land can trigger ground motions, Sufri and Koper note.
Because the strongest ground motions are typically created at or near a storm, researchers can track its progress using seismic data alone. That offers opportunities for scientists to delve through old data sets—especially those from the presatellite era—to look for signs of storms that might have been missed by earthbound observers, or to better estimate their paths and intensities, Sufri says.
via Superstorm Sandy Shook the Earth – ScienceNOW.
It amazes me how sensitive those seisometers must be.