May 23, 2014
Distrust the center
Automated location information can be very useful, but if the ‘location’ is an area and the automated result is a single point, it’s easy to get misled.
- I wrote about an interactive map of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, and the pertussis epidemic it maps as being in the Ngaanyatjarra lands in Australia’s Western Desert.
- Mapping mentions of ‘Nigeria’ to the centre of the country was one of the problems of the 538 piece on kidnappings last week
- An analysis relating right-wing politics to porn viewing, among its other issues, had a lot of users mapped to Kansas, because that’s where the centre of the USA is.
- Wayne Dobson, who lives in Las Vegas, doesn’t have your cell phone. His house is where a lot of ‘uncertain location’ phone positions get mapped to.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »