Statistics

What your zip code reveals about you. More on data brokers and how advertisers and businesses use your information to sell you stuff.

A prediction on the cost of a college degree in 2030. Interesting, although the model is simplistic, namely it assumes tuitions will never level off (if just for a little while) and when no one can afford tuition, there’s going to be more change. Plus the Internet is changing things.

Looking for a data scientist? Here’s what you should look for skills-wise.

Employee theft accounts for billions of dollars of lost merchandise per year, so…

Yelp is putting up over 200,000 reviews and offering ten $5,000 awards for students who want to make use of their data.

Deputy editor at Ars Technica Nate Anderson was curious if he could learn…

Math professor Jeff Bergen explains the odds of picking a perfect bracket.…

Do singer-songwriters age well like a fine wine, or does quality decline with…

John Snow’s Cholera data in more formats. Includes death locations, pump locations, the original map, and Ordinance Survey maps. This could be useful for a class or if you want to kick the tires on some mapping software.

At SXSW, Nate Silver discusses data bias and the strangeness of fame.

Jake Porway, executive director of DataKind on data hackathons and why they require…

Lois Beckett for ProPublica has a thorough piece on data brokers — companies…

Quandl is a search engine for time series data. Similar to DataMarket, but probably with more straightforward download.

Along the same lines as Google Flu Trends, researchers at Microsoft, Stanford and…

The General Social Survey has been running since 1972, and many questions have remain unchanged to make comparisons possible. The data from then to 2012 can now be downloaded in a variety of formats. [via]

Hackathons to put open data to use.

The United States Census Bureau just made more data available via their API. You can now access decennial data for 1990, 2000, and 2010. The API isn’t especially advanced, but it’s a heck of a lot better than PDF tables.

Andrew Leonard for Salon fears what might come of the creative process if…

ESPN profiled professional basketball gambler Bob Voulgaris. He shoots a lot of data into a predictive model for NBA games and then makes bets based on simulations. His ROI is falling.

From the Winnipeg Sun. Something isn’t right here. [via]…