Data

The Medici were one of the great ruling families of Europe during the Renaissance.  How did they come to rule?  Not power, or money, or armies, but through the strength of their social network.  And speaking of great historical social networks, analysis of the network of letter-writing during the Enlightenment is helping humanities scholars track the dispersion of great ideas across the world during that time, from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin and everyone in between.

Relevant links:
https://www2.bc.edu/~jonescq/mb851/Mar12/PadgettAnsell_AJS_1993.pdf
http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/index.html

Great Social Networks in History

It's storytime this week--the story, from beginning to end, of how Katie designed and built the main project for Udacity's Intro to Machine Learning class, when she was developing the course.  The project was to use email and financial data to hunt for signatures of fraud at Enron, one of the biggest cases of corporate fraud in history; that description makes the project sound pretty clean but getting the data into the right shape, and even doing some dataset merging (that hadn't ever been done before), made this project much more interesting to design than it might appear.  Here's the story of what a data analysis like this looks like...from the inside.

Inside a Data Analysis: Fraud Hunting at Enron

A few months ago, Katie started on a project for the Vice President's Cancer Moonshot surrounding how data can be used to better fight cancer.  The project is all wrapped up now, so we wanted to tell you about how that work went and what changes to cancer data policy were suggested to the Vice President.

See lineardigressions.com for links to the reports discussed on this episode.

Data

Daisy Kornblum