Georgetown Lecture

gistfile1.md

Outline for Georgetown Business Class

• Who I am
  • Election Data
  • Olympics
  • Wikileaks
  • Source
• Journalist's Best friends: SKEPTICISM AND PARANOIA
  • They're here to keep you from making mistakes
  • SKEPTICISM - is this data really correct?
  • PARANOIA - am I going to destroy my reputation?
• Let's relate this to data visualization
• Bad studies
  • Pornhub "Study" of Dem/Reps
  • DC wine drinking outlier
  • Are small schools better?
  • Twitter hate maps
• Data
  • Correlation is NOT causation
    • Yet we report it [strokes caused by lack of sleep and too much sleep?]
    • Hidden Variables and Random Chance
  • Statistical Methods Have Weaknesses
    • Averages obscure skew in populations
    • Smaller populations often have greater variance.
  • Cross-examine Your Proxies
    • Example of GDP as an established proxy for wealth
    • Pornhub's bad proxy for Dem/GOP states
    • Movoto's Stress Index
  • Try To Start With The Question, Not The Data
    • Inductive vs. Abductive Reasoning
    • Does the Data you have match the question you want to ask?
• Maps
  • Does it need to be a map?
  • Heat Maps that are population maps
  • I'm really tired of pointless state-by-state choropleths
  • Let's Try To Do Better than Parodies