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Politics and porn (What's the matter with Kansas?)

Distrust your data
by Jacob Harris, Source (opennews.org) 22 May 2014

Harris identifies 6 ways to make mistakes in reporting data

• Sloppy proxieson
• Dichotomizing
• Correlation does not equal causation
• Ecological inference
• Geocoding
• Data naivete

His principle example is a story that was widely covered in social media. It concerned but the biggest is related to "geocoding"

What happened here was that a large percentage of IP addresses could not be resolved to an address any more specific than “USA.” When that address was geocoded, it returned a point in the centroid of the continental United States, which placed it in the state of—you guessed it—Kansas!

Submitted by Paul Alper