Numbers, Graphs, and Apple Strudels
Romantic comedy or action movie? While this cliché certainly oversimplifies the differences in movie preferences between men and women, it is common knowledge that certain movie genres primarily target one gender. The colloquial term chick flick refers to movies targeted to a female audience whereas guy movies are mainly aimed at male viewers. For example, a study found that female viewers have a…
According to Alexa.com , an Amazon subsidiary that analysis web traffic, YouTube is the world’s most popular social media site. Its user numbers even exceed those of web giants such as Facebook or Wikipedia. Over the past twelve years, YouTube has become a diverse platform where users can find and watch videos in a wide variety of genres, from cute cats to recorded university lectures. Even though…
In this blog post, I would like to share the Yearly Bills of Mortality dataset that I recently generated. The Bills of Mortality were a mortality statistic for London and were first published in the 17th century. Besides the number of deaths, they also provide information about the cause of death since 1629. The first time I read about these documents was in a newspaper article in The Telegraph…
Today’s blog post is a visualization of traffic collisions in New York City. The New York Police Departmentpublishes information about motor vehicle collisions on the official NYC OpenData platform. The dataset contains nearly one million incidents going back to the year 2012. For the following visualizations, I only looked at accidents that occurred during the year 2016 in Manhattan (n=36,680).…
In one of my first posts , I wrote about the age difference of movie couples and showed that the male is, on average, slightly older than his partner. The goal of this article is to find out whether there is a similar trend among real celebrity couples. Even though the age difference in sexual relationships is a frequent subject of proper scientific studies, I thought it would be still interesting…
Last week, I found out that my credit card information was stolen and used by criminals for an expensive shopping spree. This incident inspired me to revisit my previous post about drug dealing on the Darknet and research how stolen credit cards are traded there. I was able to gather a dataset of 42,497 stolen U.S. credit cards which are currently sold on a Darknet site. At the end of this post,…
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about how penny auction sites make you money. As a reaction, some readers sent me links to day trading brokers that promise easy returns. These brokers allow private investors to hold stocks or currencies positions for a short time which makes it possible to speculate on small price changes. Many day traders use the margin and leverage to increase the size of…
Pokemon GO quickly became one of the most popular mobile games. In cities all around the world, you can see people searching for Pokemon and battling other players in Poke Gyms. While exploring this new augmented reality, it’s easy to forget about the dangerous of the real word. On a daily basis, news sites report on Pokemon Go related incidents like child abandonment , reckless driving , or…
I had the idea for this blog post while I was watching some interviews on YouTube. The videos of the Conan show stood out to me because many of them seem to be focused on sexual topics. To me, it looks like they were following the simple “sex sells” approach. Not that there’s something inherently wrong with this, it just appears that Conan uses it much more than other late-night show channels.…
While I was browsing through the City of Chicago’s Data Catalog , I came across a dataset of the city’s 32,000 employees which included their full names, position titles, and annual salaries. I thought that it was a great opportunity to find out whether the gender pay gap was a problem there also. The gender pay gap is the average difference between men’s and women’s earnings, which in the US is…
Today’s blog post is once again about the visualization of movie data. As I already experimented with the IMDb dataset to compare the average age of actors and actresses, I wanted to try something a bit different. One thing that I have always found cool is the visualization of movie plots (e.g. xkcd ). The reason why I never attempted to do something like this myself was that I had no idea from…
In one of my previous blog articles , I wrote about how drug dealers use the darknet to sell their products. For this post, I will use police reports to show you more about drug possession in the real world. I chose the city of Chicago because they make all reported incidents of crime available through their open data platform which is the basis for the following analysis. What are the most common…
Let me start this post by noting that I will not attempt to test Godwin’s Law , which states that: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. In this post, I’ll only try to find out how many Reddit comments mention Nazis or Hitler and ignore the context in which they are made. The data source for this analysis is the Reddit dataset…
For this week’s blog post, I will try to find out how the international news media writes about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump; the presidential front-runners of both parties. The plan is to check on several international news sources to derive positive and negative things regarding Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Doing this will give us an idea of how the news media in other countries, writes…
This blog article is about reddit.com , a website where people can post links to interesting websites and discuss a wide variety of different topics. According to Alexa , a company who analyzes web traffic, Reddit is the ninth most popular site in the United States. Reddit has thousands of different subcategories, called subreddits, which are usually moderated by volunteers. There are subreddits…
Unless you use an ad blocker, you probably notice ads for penny auction sites from time to time. They usually advertise with sketchy messages like “iPhone sold for $14.21.” They can sell iPhones such low prices because of their unusual auction system where each bid increases the auction price by only one cent. This works because unlike eBay each bid costs money (e.g., $0.40) no matter if you end…
In this blog post, I would like to present you tweetanalyzer.net , a small project of mine, where you can do a sentiment analysis of your tweets or the ones of any other Twitter user. The goal was to create a fun website which uses text analysis to determine how positive someone’s tweets are. After you signed in with your Twitter account, you can type in any username and the website will…
Nowadays, there are some many great shows on television or available for streaming. After binge-watching the first season of Jessica Jones, I knew that I had to post something about this topic. I have to admit that I never spend much time on text analysis, so I decided to start with the basics. The first thing I did was to create simple word clouds based on the subtitles of Jessica Jones , The…
I recently got my hands on Diana S. Dolliver’s paper about drug dealing on the Tor network, a hidden, uncensored network which can only be accessed by special software . I got interested this topic because it allows us to analyse transactions which used to be hidden and nearly impossible to observe. Besides the many legitimate use cases of the Tor network, it also provides together with Bitcoin…
In response to my last post about the distribution of ages of actresses and actors, a Reddit user suggested investigating further the age difference between female and male movie stars. In my first simple analysis, I only compared the average ages of both groups in the overall sample. Now, the next step is to check on a movie basis if there is an age difference between the leading actress and her…
The IMDb dataset is a great source for everyone loves movies and numbers. After I had figured out how to import the data into a local SQL database, the first thing I did was to look at the age of the actresses and actors during filming. It turns out that the average actress is, with a median age of 32, seven years younger than her male counterpart who is on average 39 years old. The diagram below…