Archive for March, 2008
I Swivel Data
March 28th, 2008(This post is the second in a three-part series on data-sharing websites. Part one is here.)
I’d heard of the data-sharing site Swivel some time ago. When I first went there, there weren’t a lot of datasets uploaded, so there wasn’t much to look at. The site was in a pretty rough-and-ready state, too. So I figured I’d just check back later, and some months later, I did just that, leading to this write-up.
Swivel is a website started in December 2005 by two physics majors named Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy. They call themselves “data nerds”, a …
Mind the Gap
March 21st, 2008(This post is the first in a three-part series on data sharing websites. However, I reserve the right to add more parts should I come across more worthy pages.)
While doing research on new data sources, I came across an excellent site I hadn’t heard of before called Gapminder. I suspect the name is a play on the classic British Underground slogan, “Mind the Gap”, but I can’t be sure, especially since the site is run by a Swede named Hans Rosling (who apparently is a sword swallower in his spare time - try saying “Swede sword swallower” five …
Naming A.D.
March 14th, 2008There’s an awful lot that’s been written over the years about what to name your kids, in the U.S. especially. A good recent example is from a book I mention frequently in here, Freakonomics. In it, the authors discovered that your kid’s name doesn’t correlate at all with how they do in life, and talk about what the most popular baby names were and where they come from. (For the record, my name, David, has always been popular. It’s nice to be popular in at least one thing in my life.)
Another good example was in the New York Times …
“Predictions Are Often Wrong, Especially About the Future”
March 7th, 2008I’m not quite sure who’s responsible for the quote that’s the title of this post, but whoever said it, I agree. I’m not even sure where I first read the quote, but I my best guess is that it was in one of Nassim Taleb’s books, which I blogged about a while back. But just because we’re bad about predicting the future, does that mean we can’t find a better way to do so?
Well, some events are easy to predict, at least. These are events that Taleb says belong to “Mediocristan”, a fictional place where everything happens …