Statistical analysis of OKCupid profiles exposes some sexually fascinating revelations:
-
Herbivores like giving oral more than omnivores
- Twitter users are more likely to masturbate today
- Christians and Atheists are just as likely to claim they have
never masturbated
- The correlation between men who prefer gentle sex & use of the word 'boating'
I f**king love statistics
[more inside]
posted by 0bvious
on Aug 31, 2011 -
75 comments
Massive Biometric Project Gives Crores of Indians an ID: Aadhaar faces titanic physical and technical challenges: reaching millions of illiterate Indians who have never seen a computer, persuading them to have their irises scanned, ensuring that their information is accurate, and safeguarding the resulting ocean of data. This is India, after all—a country notorious for corruption and for failing to complete major public projects. And the whole idea horrifies civil libertarians. But if Aadhaar’s organizers pull it off, the initiative could boost the fortunes of India’s poorest citizens and turbocharge the already booming national economy. [more inside]
posted by infini
on Aug 30, 2011 -
30 comments
Jer Thorp is the
New York Times' current Data Artist in Residence. He creates information-rich animations, most recently of the latest
Kepler candidate extrasolar planets [previously]; also a global render of
people's uses of
Twitter.
Lee Byron is a designer, artist, and biker: his work includes visualisations of
Facebook breakups over the course of a year and
Hollywood box office revenues, 1986 - 2008.
David McCandless is an "information journalist"; his blog,
InformationisBeautiful.net, has been
linked to
plenty of
times on the
blue, but you might enjoy
this overview of his work and others at TED. Similarly, Hans Rosling,
also mentioned previously.
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Feb 10, 2011 -
6 comments
Dataists give their hopes and dreams for data, data tools and
data science in 2011.
Already, Google has provided
Google Refine (
previously) to help clean your datasets. While great
visualizations can be created with online
tools or by combining R (great
posts previously), with
ggplot2,
GGobi, and even
Google Motion Charts With R (already built into Google
Spreadsheets).
Need data?
Needlebase, helps non-programmers scrape, harvest, merge, and data from the web. Or if you’re introspective,
Your Flowing Data and
Daytum provide tools to measure and chart details of your own life.
posted by stratastar
on Jan 11, 2011 -
19 comments
Misinformation and the 2010 Election - A Study of the US Electorate. The key findings of the study are:
1. Perceptions of Misleading and False Information An overwhelming majority of voters said that they encountered misleading or false information in the last election, with a majority saying that this occurred frequently and occurred more frequently than usual.
2. Evidence of Misinformation Among Voters The poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the issues prominent in the election campaign, including the stimulus legislation, the healthcare reform law, TARP, the state of the economy, climate change, campaign contributions by the US Chamber of Commerce and President Obama’s birthplace. In particular, voters had perceptions about the expert opinion of economists and other scientists that were quite different from actual expert opinion.
[more inside]
posted by caddis
on Dec 19, 2010 -
53 comments
Most graduate students are surely aware of the many rigors and regulation of thesis preparation. For example, here is a
FAQ on preparing for the "snake fight" portion of your thesis defense.
posted by jjray
on Nov 24, 2010 -
28 comments
Edward Tufte, patron saint of information visualization, is auctioning off his sizeable library of rare books, including major works in the history of science and statistical graphics. Christies auction catalogue is
available for your perusal. First edition Isaac Newton, anyone?
posted by krunk
on Nov 10, 2010 -
35 comments
The FBI has released their extensive files on US Senator Edward M. Kennedy to the public, covering their relationship with him between 1961 and 1985. The seven files, totaling more than 2,200 pages of documents
reveal (among other things,) the perhaps unsurprising news that the late Senator
received "scores" of
death threats from radical groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, “Minutemen” organizations, and the National Socialist White People’s Party. The release was initiated by a Freedom of Information Act Request from
Judicial Watch on May 3, 2010, (Complaint
pdf) but the FBI gave the Senator's family the
"rare opportunity" to raise objections before releasing the file.
posted by zarq
on Jun 14, 2010 -
20 comments
Gravity from Quantum Information At the heart of their idea is the tricky question of what happens to information when it enters a black hole. Physicists have puzzled over this for decades with little consensus. But one thing they agree on is Landauer's principle: that erasing a bit of quantum information always increases the entropy of the Universe by a certain small amount and requires a specific amount of energy. (via
mr)
posted by kliuless
on Apr 1, 2010 -
33 comments
In
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, Jason Epstein posits "The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them... The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives."
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Mar 3, 2010 -
19 comments
TweetCatcha visualizes the tweets resulting from the latest news articles that appeared during the last 24 hours on the New York Times website. Pretty amazing for student work.
See TweetCatcha in action (warning: it takes a bit of time to load). While it's loading, here is the creator's
blog post describing it.
posted by like_neon
on Feb 16, 2010 -
10 comments
Peter Morville is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as an advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining web user experience. His recent project titled
Search Patterns, is a sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns; for example
spime search, the ability to query objects in motion and find things in the real world. Morville is also on the editorial board of the new
Journal of Information Architecture.
posted by netbros
on Jul 31, 2009 -
4 comments
Question Boxes "bring information to people who cannot or do not access the Internet directly. Question Boxes leap over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers.... Question Box users can use their mobile phones to call our call centers, or they can use the physical Question Box Units to call for free." The program was started by Rose Shuman, a young American entrepreneur. You can see the questions
here.
posted by languagehat
on Jul 12, 2009 -
24 comments
Journalism may be going through a painful period but thanks to the web the once lowly information graphic is finally growing up to be all it never could on paper. Especially the New York Times seems to currently stand out in how frequently and quickly they build amazingly detailed and insightful interactive features. Consider the
tracking of US Airways Flight 1549 or the piece on
raising its engine from the Hudson. Other recent highlights:
9,955,441 parking tickets issues in NYC mapped by street,
The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 — 2008,
Ansel Adams's Yosemite,
the view from the 10-meter platform explained,
A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses 1789 to the Present,
A Map of the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games,
Going to the End of the Line,
The 44 Places to go in 2009, an explanation of
how the Pentagon responded to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld,
The Soyuz Spacecraft,
How the Towers Stood and Fell and
many,
many, more.
[more inside]
posted by krautland
on Feb 14, 2009 -
16 comments
