Banks are better at hiding fees than you are at finding them, and even if you think you’re being terribly clever by paying off your card in full each month, chances are you’d still be better off just using a debit card instead.
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Thanks to the Marginal Revolution and the J-Walk blog for this.
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A number of commentators have remarked on the trial and tribulations of Harry, a programmer tasked with making sense of a 100 years of weather observations from 10’s of thousands of observation posts around the globe.
The data set apparently has been worked on by so many different hands that its integrity is at issue. Harry [...]
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Continuing my exploration of similar data sets, I’ve pointed my algorithm at the New York Stock Exchange stock price movements over the past two weeks.
The companies listed below exhibit the strongest correlation in their stock price movements. The number of correlated companies was much lower than I expected. I guess that’s why technical analysis of [...]
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I’ll end my exploration of the clusters in this data set by looking at the 14th largest cluster by contribution value. This cluster is not comprised of movie stars or investment bankers, realtors or health professionals: it is comprised of homemakers in Michigan.
Somehow, the Democrats have managed to get 264 homemakers from a small area [...]
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One of the most interesting clusters is the Hospitals/Nursing Home cluster in Texas because it represents the first foray into the realm of the Average Joe. It comes in at number 10 on our list and is comprised of staff from the Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.
In this hospital located on the Mexican border of Texas, [...]
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For the second largest cluster, we need to travel from LA all the way to Connecticut. This cluster contains hedge fund staff and investment bankers from Connecticut, in that little nook north of New York. These individuals each contributed over USD $30K to the Democrats.
If I were the Democrats, I’d be asking “Why these companies?”; “Why this [...]
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Carrying on from the previous post, the top 20 contribution clusters provide some interesting insights into potential tactics for the Democrats and Republicans to pursue to increase their contributions. The top 20 are as follows:
There’s quite a breadth of industries represented in the top 20 ranging from TV/Movies/Music in California, to Securities and Investment in [...]
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Over the past 10 years, I’ve spent much of my time pulling actionable insights out of data. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this out loud, but I enjoy it.
I’ve recently been experimenting with an approach I’ve developed for identifying clusters of similar transactions within a data set. Seeing every group of clustered transactions within a data [...]
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Thanks to Flowing Data for linking to another great graphic from the New York Times. This type of graphic falls into the category of tree maps which, along with the bubble chart, are my favourite tools in my data analysts toolkit. The tree map and the bubble chart allow the relationships between multi-dimensional data sets [...]
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