September 19, 2013

No Sasquatch on the Prairies?

In a post titled "Big Data meets Bigfoot," Boing Boing summarizes "Bigfoot in Penn State PhD candidate Joshua Stevens's visualization of nearly a century of Sasquatch sighting reports in the US and Canada."

Stevens writes,
Right away you can see that sightings are not evenly distributed. At first glance, it looks a lot like a map of population distribution. After all, you would expect sightings to be the most frequent in areas where there are a lot of people. But a bivariate view of the data (right) shows a very different story. There are distinct regions where sightings are incredibly common, despite a very sparse population. On the other hand, in some of the most densely populated areas sasquatch sightings are exceedingly rare.
Go there for the interesting graphics. And as one commenter notes, maybe "the answer is likely game cameras, lots and lots of game cameras."

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