Applying Benford's Law to CAR
In case you missed it at IRE Miami this year, Phil Meyer and Steve Doig put on a great panel about techniques reporters could and should be applying, but, for whatever reason, are not.
One of the techniques Meyer mentioned is known as Benford's Law -- a decades-old mathematical rule that forensic accountants have recently used to spot fraud by examining the distribution of individual digits in large datasets. I've been meaning to test it out for a long time, ever since I came across this old New York Times article earlier this year, but I ...
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Point-in-poly using MySQL and Python
In which I describe how to use MySQL's spatial functions and Python to do point-in-polygon detection. Read | 0 comments
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Yes, I'm still alive
Some tidbits I've collected over the last month and a half. Read | 0 comments
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Simple database backups with S3
Backing up your databases is easy with S3, boto and mysqldump. Read | 0 comments
Links
- Gdal_grid Do point interpolation rasterizing like Spatial Analyst. For free. (2 comments)
- Doing Journalism in the 21st Century Come see me and Jaimi put on a Future Talk. (0 comments)
- New app: Neighborhood Watch | mattwaite.com As usual, Matt does great work. (0 comments)
- Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents Analyzing free text has been an interest of mine for a while. Here are a few ways data visualization can add to the mix. (0 comments)
- Bus firm in crash often gets used by school districts | Chron.com Angel Tours, the charter bus company tied to a deadly North Texas crash this month, also shuttled children and students on dozens of trips since 2006, mostly for extracurricular events ... (0 comments)
- Charitable donations with a political twist | Chron.com At Harris County Commissioners Court, campaign donations of $5,000 or more come along as often as hot days in a Texas summer. So, donors looking to stand apart from the ... (3 comments)
- Fuel scams slip by feds' watchdogs | Chron.com A little-known federal program designed in part to protect consumers from bogus fuel-saving gadgets has done little lately to help debunk claims - even as gas prices have climbed to ... (0 comments)
