indigo_rose99

spam calls

Wed, 09 May 2018 01:29:13 GMT

It was late November of last year. I kept getting so many spam calls I thought I must be going insane. So... I started collecting data on how many of my incoming calls are spam.

So that week was unusual. But then the number of calls went back to the typical about 4 a week.

So, being me with my fondness for data, I kept collecting the data. And sometime after the new year... I felt again like the number of spam calls was increasing. Was I crazy? Here, you look.

Each point in this chart is the number of spam calls I got that week. Last year it was 4 calls a week. This year, in the phase I call "two" it is almost 8 calls per week. Yes, this is really statistically different. And it feels different in the real world of how many times I do not answer the ringing phone. Further it kinda looks like the number of calls in "two" is going.... up. The most recent point is this week, and it is only Tuesday! I have four more days of this week to get spam calls!

Todays Special Call was officially from someone claiming that the IRS is filing a lawsuit against me and an arrest warrant has been issued. It is a lie, of course, the IRS does not call anyone. I reported that one to the FCC.

Update: Evidently I'm not alone.
Update 2: Friday of the same week, I am now up to TWENTY SIX (26!!!) spam calls this week. Look back at the chart and it is OFF THE CHART!!! I really hope this is a outlier and not the continuation of a trend that it appears.

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school shootings

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 21:29:22 GMT

It turns out that school shootings have been happening for a much longer time than I had any idea.

People keep talking about "The number of school shootings this year is..." and then they will name a number that just seems insane. So I went looking for a reference and some data. Wikipedia is our friend. Without too much trouble, I even pulled the data into some statistical software and started making graphs to answer my curious questions.

How many deaths and injuries have there been in school shootings? United States only. Each point in the following graph is an incident. There is a red and blue point for each shooting incident -- red x for deaths, blue point for injuries.

Yes, there was one in the 1700s. Cray.

Everyone keeps talking about how the number of shooting incidents is going up. Is it? I mean, it kinda looked like the points in the above graph were becoming more dense as we move toward the present. What if I summarize the data by year? Are recent years getting worse? Each point in the graph below is a year. The top black points are the number of shooting incidents in that year. The bottom graph is the deaths and injuries that year.

When looking at the above graph, when did the number of incidents start taking a turn upward? In a no-statistics-tests way I played with the graph and it looks like it happened sometime in the 1960s.

How does this year (2018) compare to past years? It seems a bit unfair to strictly compare ALL of the data in past years to just this point in 2018, so I made a subset of the data that made the above graph to include only incidents that happened up to this point in the year.

And the same graph, with 2018 highlighted.

To me, it looks like at least one past year had more incidents up to this point. But 2018 has had more deaths, more injuries when compared to previous years up to this day of the year.

More information and better graphs does not make this any less depressing.

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Graphs and Flu Season

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 21:58:51 GMT

I'm always on the lookout for cool graphs. I appreciate the opportunity to see graphs communicate and teach. I really like this one. It is about the recent and ongoing flu season in the US. I particularly like what they did to show the passage of time, the changes state to state, and the intensity of the flu in each state.

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