Not that statistical analysis like this isn't interesting, but when you have two choices - Red team or Blue team - which are also highly clustered and a ton of variables to use to correlate - pickup, sedan, hybrid, minivan - of course its going to be pretty easy to build a model that will pick the correct team with high accuracy.
And that’s, girls and boys, how a few PhDs back in the 10’s, either by stupidity or lack of ethics, laid the foundation for the big brother state we have today.
I'm skeptical of this.<p>How do they ascertain that the cars <i>belong</i> to the suburb? Would a suburb be ranked differently if for a month there were civil works that meant a lot of contractor vehicles etc were parked up?
What about if the local Ferrari club decides to go for a cruise and all meet at a coffee shop in the neighbouring suburb every week? What if the suburb was located in a cold region, where it's more practical for most people to drive a SUV in winter?<p>What about the republicans who drive Civics, and the republicans who drive Audis? What about the democrats that drive Toyota Tacomas, or the democrats who drive Volts?<p>I mean, what would it make of me? I have a toyota hilux for work, a mx5 (miata) for track days, and a subaru wrx sti for driving to the shops. I wonder what my political leaning would be considered to be?
So what should my next car be in order to be useless to this algorithm. I don't like being categorized and sifted. Once that information is available, it is always abused. Humans never don't abuse the power they get, and I hate it. I hate being on the receiving side. It may be small abuses, but within a civilization those add up, and we are on the edge of dying a death of a thousand cuts.
I wonder if they've got access to historical streetview images, to test how stable the claimed relationship is over time.<p>After all, when oil prices rise you'd expect people to choose more efficient cars - not necessarily to change their voting patterns. I can't see any mention in the original paper of how they calibrated for that.
Full article for those who are interested:<p><a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full?sid=2d5af382-1da4-4ffe-a9fd-16033af26746" rel="nofollow">http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/11/27/1700035114.full...</a>
I'd like to see it take into account parking habits. In my experience, it seems to be much less common to find a vehicle backed into a parking spot in more liberal areas. I wonder if this observation is correct.
This is not surprising at all. Another interesting problem that you can solve is using your social media friends' cars to predict an individual 's political leanings.
Am I the only one who is a little offended that just because you own a pickup truck then you must be conservative, and if you own a Tesla you must be liberal? Seems to me that is more stereotyping than lot's of things that social justice warriors get outraged over.