Posts tagged statistics
It’s a revolution. We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.
Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, to the New York Times. The Age of Big Data.
To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.
Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.
Ditto all the data producing sensors in industrial equipment, buying trends at the Walmarts of the world, traffic patterns and delivery routes analyzed by the likes of UPS, and on and on and on.
A great overview for those trying to understand what the Big Data fuss is all about.
Related: Big Data was a big deal at the World Economic Forum. A report issued from it called Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development can be downloaded here.
The Importance of Facebook Cannot be Overstated
Selected slides from a larger comScore deck examining global social networking, microblogging and mobile trends. Select any thumbnail to embiggen.
In related news, it’s estimated that Facebook will attract its 1 billionth user this August. That’s 14 percent of the global population.
Images: via comScore.
When Does Crime Happen
Via Datavisualization.ch:
Joe Golike and Sha Hwang of Trulia take a deeper look at when crime typically happens throughout the day in 25 big cities across the United States. The result, When does crime happen? is a set of interactive stacked area charts that allow for detailed comparison between different types of crimes and high-level comparison between different cities. On hover, a tooltip reveals more detailed information and the percentage of reported crimes per type and hour. I think the small multiples work pretty fine for comparison over cities and the charts show the data in a readable and elegant way. The visualization is built in HTML5 using Protovis and the underlying data comes from SpotCrime. Read more about their findings on the Trulia Insights blog.
Trulia Blog: When Does Crime Happen?
Worldwide, we conduct 88,000,000,000 searches per month on Google.
That’s billion, with a ‘b’.
Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
