Mythbusters | Devpost

Sample query correlation

Inspiration

As young children, we are constantly told by our parents numerous unjustified superstitions that we just took at face value. However, as we grow up and begin to truly think about the reasons behind these, we realize that they may have no basis in scientific reasoning. For example, we are constantly told that we should be more careful when the weather cools down because we are more likely to fall ill. However, how true is this statement? And can we develop a tool to demystify this type of commonly spread misconception.

To figure out the validity of these types of statements, while scientists may have the capability to examine peer-reviewed articles, the general public may not access to this type of data. As a result, we have built a platform to allow anyone regardless of their educational background to determine for themselves whether two factors correlate. In particular we focus on the interaction between environmental factors and instances of disease, which is of particular interest to parents. In addition, this application can be utilized as an educational tool to teach children about the relationships between their environment and their health.

What it does

Allow the public to plot and examine the correlation in a state-by-state manner between environmental factors and diseases of interest. Note: Please use rstudio as both the username and password to access the application.

How we built it

We mainly used R to curate and interpret the data which was manually collected from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and the United states geographical service (USGS), United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the US Census Bureau.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulty determining the final direction (functionalities provided by) of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That we collected interesting and useful health-related insights from our application.

What we learned

How to code with Shiny.

What's next for Mythbusters

In the future, we hope to incorporate the use of a web crawler to allow people to investigate datasets curated from keywords that they are specifically interested in.