I always enjoy looking at data analysis experiments from people who just like to play with numbers and who want to figure odd stuff out.  The former fun find today was this gem Books and Music That Make You Dumb where CalTeck student Virgil Griffith

used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

Griffith is also the creator of

WikiScanner, a database that tracks the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia editors, he revealed that the CIA, the Vatican, and staff of various members of Congress (among others) had made edits on the site to remove potentially sensitive information.

As for the latter, I came across a title called Spamdog Millionaire – The geography of social media spam, which I could not resist reading! In this case Philip Jacob on the StyleFeeder Tech Blog did the following

For each account that we have closed due to spammy activity, I ran their source IP addresses through a GeoIP lookup and graphed the data using DabbleDB (which I had been meaning to play with for some time – more on that later). The result: India, in a word. Pakistan, too.

The visualization was not earth shattering, however the conversation about what to do with that information was infrastructurally and geographically interesting.  The discussion centrered on the ethic of firewalling entire countries for the bad behaviours of some, and what it means when bad netizens from certain regions of the world get their nations access to content cut off!

Via: Polymeme