Archive for the 'Demographics' Category

Teens Love Guitar Hero, Part Two

November 4th, 2008

(This is the second of two parts of a series on the “Teens, Video Games, and Civics” put out by the non-partisan Pew Internet & American Life Project. Part one was about the general findings of the report. Part two, in true data nerd form, will be about the methodology of the survey.)

After a two-week hiatus and feeling refreshed, I’m back. If you’ve been following the blog, part one of this series might be a little rusty. If you need to refresh your memory, feel free. (It’s not so important, though, since this post takes …

Teens Love Guitar Hero, Part One

October 10th, 2008

(Over the next few weeks I’m going to be rolling out what I call “Version 2.0″ of this blog. Basically, I’m going to start incorporating all the things I’ve learned lately about blog writing and visual thinking. The content won’t change much, but the presentation should be quite different as I roll out all the new ideas. As for this week’s post, it’s on a survey of teen video gamers, and is large enough that I’ll have to cover it in several parts. This week is on basic findings.)

My twin brother and editor Ed recently directed …

Here’s to Life

February 8th, 2008

Recently I was reading through the various prediction-related links from Ian Ayers’ site (which I originally found through the Freakonomics blog). Regular readers might remember that I blogged once previously about Ian Ayers’ book “Super Crunchers”, which discussed the power of automated decision making, data crunching, and well-run randomized trials. But this time I had an even more important topic in mind - how long we expect to live. On Ayers’ site are a couple of excellent links that try to predict your life expectancy.

The Political Calculations link simply asks for your age and tells …