MetaFilter posts tagged with statistics

The race is on.

naju — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:42:36 -0800

"We’ve processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well." The people who run the dating site OkCupid continue to analyze the aggregate data of their users, shedding light on preferences and behavior. The most recent OkTrends post takes a look at their compiled racial data: Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back. (previously 1 2)

hi cutie ur realy sexy. msn?

Kadin2048 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:05:25 -0800

How (not) to write an online-dating message, based on a sample of 500,000 "first contact" messages. The average message from a man to a woman on OK Cupid has a 32% chance of getting a response. (Although longer is apparently better. Also, women seeking men, men seeking men, and women seeking women have somewhat better odds.) But not all messages are created equal: “netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs,” while the “top three most popular ways to say ‘hello’ were all actually bad beginnings.” OkTrends, the OK Cupid development/statistics blog, has come up previously. [Via Hacker News.]

Death Risk Rankings

OmieWise — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:57:19 -0800

"Death Risk Rankings calculates your risk of dying in the next year and allows you to compare that risk to others in the world." Fun with mortality data and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Common Sense

nola — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:36:36 -0800

C0nc0rdance [sytl] asks; How far should we trust common sense? A less than 9 min video on Common Sense as it relates to Science. Enjoy.

And you can fit the entire world's population, shoulder to shoulder, on the Isle of Wight

mippy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:46:41 -0800

What if we condensed the UK into a village of 100 people? The Independent experiment with demographics.

Peering into your neighbors' windows (in aggregate)

dammitjim — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:46:40 -0800

The fine folks at OkCupid, the dating site, have begun to analyze aggregate data from the questions their users answer to form dating profiles, revealing, among other things, that users in Nevada are more open to rape fanstasies than those from Michigan. OkCupid users often answer hundreds of such questions, and various tests, in an effort to increase their match effectiveness. OkCupid has just started their blog discussing a few questions, and ask "These are just a few of the thousands of questions we have in our database. Are there any other you’d like us to analyze?"

Does your son's name end with the letter "n"?

srs — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:01:35 -0800

Andrew Gelman recently posted this strange trend in baby naming originally posted on Laura Wattenberg's blog in 2007. Why do so many boys' names now end with the letter "n"?

Baseball Statistics Pornography

Mach5 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:48:11 -0800

Mariano's Gonna Cut You, and other stat-and-graph filled baseball analysis from Beyond the Boxscore. via the excellent Yankees blog at LoHud. 10 days to opening day! * Unless you are a Braves/Phillies fan.

Wikirank

peacay — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:39:26 -0800

Wikirank is an analytical tool that measures the popularity of trending topics on wikipedia. You can compare up to four topics and generate nifty embeddable graphs.

Silver's Picks for the Silver Screen

jonp72 — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:34:51 -0800

He predicted a losing season for the White Sox in 2007 and foresaw that the Tampa Bay Rays would be the best team in the American League in 2008, although he wrongly predicted that the Rays would win the World Series. He also predicted Obama's 6-point victory over McCain. Now the stats guru Nate Silver is picking the Oscar winners and predicting an upset win for Taraji P. Henson in the Best Supporting Actress category.

If X is Kobe Bryant and Y is the ball...

jourman2 — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:20:45 -0800

The selfless NBA stats geek, by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis previously on mefi Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.” Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.

Digital Research Tools PayDiRT

Rykey — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:45:01 -0800

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) is a wiki created by Lisa Spiro, director of Rice University's Digital Media Center. Tons of "snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers" are categorized by what you're trying to accomplish ("Analyze Statistics," "Network With Other Researchers," "Search Visually"), as well as by general topic ("Authoring," "Linguistic Tools," "Text Analysis"). Via

Harper's Index: Bush Retrospective

Non Prosequitur — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:06:51 -0800

Special 3-page edition of Harper’s Index: A retrospective of the Bush era.

Be careful drawing conclusions from this data

sambosambo — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:50:39 -0800

StateStats: Explore the popularity of search queries in U.S. states StateStats shows you how popular a particular Google search is in each state. It also shows correlation with other state rankings such as obesity, income, or unemployment. Here are some examples to get you started, and remember that correlation does not imply causation and all that. MetaFilter/Bacon Porn/Church Christmas/Hanukkah Tequila/Vodka/Rum/Whiskey/Wine Ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot/Elvis

Of All the People in the World

Dormant Gorilla — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:46:16 -0800

Of all the People in the World "uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life" . via

Black Swans and The Fourth Quadrant

vronsky — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:56:36 -0800

THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "In the following Edge original essay, Taleb continues his examination of Black Swans, the highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. He claims that those who are putting society at risk are "no true statisticians", merely people using statistics either without understanding them, or in a self-serving manner.

Craigstistics

Korou — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:50:42 -0800

Craigslistindex graphs data pulled from Craigslist listings. On the front page you can compare the costs of different regions. Listed in further detail are: rental, real estate, auto, and overall pricings; as well as personal and job listings. (via Mashup Awards, more Craigslist Mashups)

Lies, damned lies, and graphs

artifarce — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:19:48 -0800

Graph your life at MIT's Mycrocosm. Simple interface. Interesting potential. Worrying about. Freelance: No Idea What the Hell Is Going On. Food and Liquid Consumption. Also allows for sharing datasets with other users.

The sharks are just jealous of our ice cream

Tehanu — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:50:23 -0800

BBC News is running a weekly ongoing series of articles that describe and illustrate common misconceptions (and manipulations) of statistics using examples from the news and ads.
Lesson 1: surveys. Lesson 2: counting. Lesson 3: percentage. Lesson 4: averages. Lesson 5: causation.

Our Phony Economy.

chunking express — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:57:13 -0800

Our Phony Economy. From the conclusion:

The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 to 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

Government spending and tax levels

russilwvong — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:18:50 -0800

Want to know how government spending and taxation levels have gone up or down over the last 20 years, and how they compare with other countries? The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a handy set of tables (Excel, HTML-ized by Google): total spending, total revenues, fiscal surplus or deficit (Norway's surplus is 17% of GDP). Part of the statistical tables for the semi-annual OECD Outlook.

Are US Inflation and Employment Underestimated?

salvia — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:55:16 -0800

"Hard Numbers: The Economy is Worse than You Know" [full article for Harper's subscribers, a different abridged version] discusses how the Consumer Price Index and other US economic statistics have been manipulated over time. Among other things, the article claims, these changes make Social Security checks 70% lower than they would otherwise be. According to Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture blog, "the longstanding official myth that [US] inflation is modest and contained is starting to be recognized for the fraud that it is." He believes that these bad statistics give false answers to even bigger questions, like "are we in a recession?" A New York Times graphic shows what's in this basket of consumer prices, which prices are going up, and which are not. To learn more about what's not counted, visit Shadow Government Statistics, which tracks (for subscribers) what inflation would be under earlier formulas. (Previously.)

If it ain't a mess, it'll do till the mess gets here

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:53:14 -0800

Statistics compiled by State Senator Eliot Shapleigh in the state's annual ranking, entitled "Texas on the Brink" report dreary news in just about all categories used to characterize standards of living, from education to health to enfranchisement. Statistics were compiled from the Census Bureau, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency and a number of bipartisan foundations.

US Presidential Greatness as a Function of Experience

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:25:50 -0800

Is an Experienced President a Good President?

Put away your asterisks

mrgrimm — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:16:55 -0800

Steroids, "Other Drugs," and Baseball: a Voice of Scepticism on the Impact of Steroids on Major League Baseball. Eric Walker suggests a "juiced" ball made much more of an effect than PEDs.