I hate hot weather passionately. Or more accurately, lethargically: when the temperature goes above 25, I find myself unable to concentrate on anything.
But now I find myself wondering: what makes people dress down in the heat? Do they choose their clothing based on today’s weather, yesterday’s weather, or some combination of the two?
Fortunately, we have the data and technology to answer this. I’m not going to
implement
it (see: lethargy). But here’s what I would do, if I had the time/energy — and perhaps I will when autumn comes and I start to wake up.
Skin-detection algorithms already exist. This is the only freely-available code I could find for the purpose; I haven’t tested it.
You’d also need a source of images, tagged by date and location. Flickr will probably give you that, if you choose the right tags to narrow it down to full-body portraits of people. You can get weather information from The US National Weather Service, although it’s not clear what historical data is available. Failing that, you could limit photos to a particular group of dates/locations, for which you manually look up the historical weather. Then just assemble the data, and run some regressions.