(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
This post is by David K. Park and courtesy of Alex Palen Ellis…
Thought you might find this funny:
Buzzfeed set out to study porn consumption versus the red/blue political spectrum. And they failed miserably. An article form opennews.org outlines six major fallacies Buzzfeed committed, the best of which resulted in the Kansas effect:
“Pornhub’s writeup omitted any explicit description of their methodology—this is never a good sign—but it seems to have involved mapping the IP addresses from which users visited the site to physical addresses and reverse geocoding those to get states…. 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!”
As a result, Kansas was 2.95 std dev above the mean. Those pervs!
from: https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/distrust-your-data/
The post Buzzfeed, Porn, Kansas…That Can’t Be Good appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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