The whole article comes across very "nerdy and scientific" but indeed isn't at all. Just the difference between correlation and dependence are already something they should look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
To be fair, they were pretty clear that their data was a correlation, not a causation. But the stuff about prostitution on second Wednesdays is pretty crazily unsubstantiated, and controversial.
That's because one of the side-effects of big data is the new definition "data scientist" = Ph.D. <graduate|dropout> in any field, no matter how unrelated to statistics or data mining.
