Over the last week or two, I've seen a number of reports describing worried residents of New Jersey complaining about drones flying overhead. The New York Times looked into this (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/nyregion/drone-sightings-nj.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iU4.8_jE.fIR4uwfOh6l3&smid=url-share), but so did the Daily Show (https://youtu.be/I4dbALnlezA?si=Jgp-3YBVn5LXFIln&t=244), with some choice quotes from politicians and experts.

The bottom line seems to be that there's nothing to worry about if you live in New Jersey.

But elsewhere in the world, including where I live in Israel, drones are an increasingly serious part of the military arsenal, as well as something to think and worry about. Israel has been developing, using, and even exporting them for many years. In the last year, we've been on the receiving end of many drones from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen. Ukraine, which continues to fight off the Russian invasion, is using drones in its own territory and also on Russian soil; a recent article in the Economist said that Ukraine is producing lots of drones, including maritime drones meant to attack Russian ships. We know that Russia is importing drones from Iran, too.

And modern military drones are no longer just for observation; some can fire guns and missiles, and others are designed to explode on impact with a target.

I was curious to know more about these drones, and found that CNAS (the Center for a New American Security, at https://www.cnas.org) has a "Drone Proliferation Dataset" (https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/drone-proliferation-dataset). This data set tracks who has been selling drones, who has been buying them, and what those drones' capabilities are. A great deal of their research uses open-source data sets and investigations, and CNAS tries to indicate where they got their data. But of course, military sales and purchases aren't typically announced publicly, which means that the numbers they provide almost certainly understate reality.

This week, we'll look at this data set, getting a better idea of what drones are out there, who is producing them, and even who is trading with whom.

Data and seven questions

We'll look at the Drone Proliferation Dataset, which you can download as a zipfile from CNAS:

https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/documents/CNAS-Drone-Proliferation-Dataset-Sept-2024.zip

This zipfile contains both the data (in an Excel file) and a data dictionary that is quite readable and helpful.

I have seven tasks and questions for you this week. The learning goals include cleaning data, understanding interpolation, plotting, pivot tables, and working with multi-indexes.

I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions and the Jupyter notebook I used to solve these problems.

• Import the Excel data into a Pandas data frame. Clean up any issues you see with the column names.
• How long does it take from when a drone is ordered until a drone is first delivered? Is there a substantial difference between the mean and median? What does that mean? (You can ignore any rows in which we have NaN for either of those columns.)