Design and Analytics

If you're in NYC today around NYU, I'm presenting at the HackNY Masters conference.  I'll be presenting at 8:30---the topic being "3 Statistical Tricks Every Hacker should know." 

Since moving to New York from Chicago, every time I mention to New Yorkers that Chicago is a much better city, without fail they almost always reply, "But Chicago is so cold!"  I have brushed this off as a parochial New York-ism for some time ("But isn't everywhere west of the Hudson cold and miserable?"), feeling that in my experience in the two cities, they're both about the same amount of cold.  New York is at 40.7N, Chicago is at 41.8N---this is all of 60 miles, or about an hour's drive difference.  I'd hardly believe that amounts to a significant change in temperature.

But today, I decided to actually check data and play with a new charting tool.  Here's what data source World Climate has to say about it:

Ah well. Next time.

I made this point with Venkatesh Rao in our Future of Data Project for the CSC, but found myself at a table at the MongoDB NYC conference talking through it again---I think it's a useful enough idea, and maybe even an original enough one, to devote a post to.  (Thank you to my Data Science employer Noodle Education for sending me there.)