Archive for December, 2007
Happy Holidays
December 27th, 2007Merry (belated) Christmas and Happy Holidays from The Data Mine Shaft, everybody! As you might expect, things have been pretty crazy for me. Between doctor’s appointments, seeing relatives and friends from out of town, Christmas shopping, extra work, and a week long vacation starting tomorrow, I haven’t had any time to work on a post. Next week is probably out too (since I’ll be on vacation). Keep your eyes peeled for a post on the linguistics of fortune cookies in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, feel free to check out some Patriots/Giants related data, as …
Field Study - The Mall
December 20th, 2007Christmas is almost here, and in that spirit I’m here to talk to you about one of Christmas’ biggest rituals - shopping. Though Black Friday is sometimes the biggest shopping day of the year, as often as not it’s the Saturday before Christmas instead (by both sales and customer traffic). I don’t know which one will be bigger this year and I’m not going to guess; I prefer to avoid the huge crowds, personally. Women don’t seem to share my aversion, though. I brought up the huge shopping days to several women I know, and they seemed …
Everybody Writes, Part Two
December 14th, 2007(This post is the second part of a two-part series on “Everybody Votes”, a channel on the Nintendo Wii dedicated to voting on everyday topics. The first part is here. If you read any of those links they’ll bring you up to speed. You might be able to make sense of this post without reading any of them, but it’d probably be a lot of hassle. So, to prevent a lot of repetition, I won’t be going over what “Everybody Votes” is any further than that, or how I got the data.)
Last time I went over …
Everybody Writes, Part One
December 6th, 2007“Everybody Votes” is a “channel” you can tune into on your Wii, Nintendo’s latest and greatest video game console. (If you can get one that is, but that’s a subject for another post.) “Everybody Votes” is the rare combination of two loves of mine: video games and data mining.
Basically, every couple of days you can put in a vote on some random topic Nintendo comes up with. You always have a choice between two distinct options, and you must choose one or the other. If you want to say “I don’t know”, the best you can …