5.3 Reading Data from the Internet
Earlier, we used statistical functions on a week’s worth of data about earthquakes from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) website (usgs.gov). One advantage of using such a small set of values was that we could easily demonstrate the concepts of mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. In particular, we used summary data as our data set: the number of earthquakes per day for a seven-day period. The real power of statistics and other methods of analysis, however, can be realized on larger raw (not summarized) collections of data.
Internet sites often provide large sets of data that can be downloaded for analysis. These data sets are usually made available in several formats: text files in CSV (comma-separated ...
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