Apr 12
Guesstimation
Written by Chelsey Delaney | Posted in UncategorizedWhat country has the highest unemployment rate and how many people are unemployed? What percentage of the U.S. population has some form of cancer?
The statistics seem differ all over the place–Who to believe? The numbers jump and are lost in the jumble from year to year and site to site (honestly, how many percentages can we learn about cancer and remember?).
That’s where Numbrary comes in.
Numbrary serves as the database of…data. Providing updated numbers for census reports, health reports, global warming reports– we’ll never second-guess statistical memory again.
Tags: cancer, environmental report, health report, internet, numbers, numbrary, statistics, statistics database, technology, website
One Response to “Guesstimation”
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Hi,
Another UT grad student and I have launched from right here in Austin infochimps.org, a tool to make sharing, finding and exploring rich datasets easy.
Our goal is to build the “Allmanac” that will sit at the end of the shelf next to wikipedia’s encyclopedia — Where wikipedia helps you find out something about everything, infochimps.org will help you find out everything about something. The site’s very new, but we’re excited about its potential.
The other worthy efforts in this arena are http://swivel.com (concentrates on visualization), http://CKAN.net (indexes data sources), http://dbpedia.com (mining wikipedia) and http://freebase.com (sprawling integration of human-scale information). There’s been some recent buzz on all this — see
ReadWriteWeb, “Where to Find Open Data on the Web” and X-googler Bret Taylor, “We need a Wikipedia for data”. Anyone who’s into this stuff should begin by joining the community of data nerds at <a href=”http://theinfo.org”>http://theinfo.org.
Right now the economists have economic data, and the meteorologists have weather data, and the baseball nerds have baseball data. None of it’s in the same place, or in the same format, or can speak to the same tools. All of this is about to become interconnected and universal. Think the police are being told to cook their stats? Compare crime data by voter district and point in the election cycle for different crime categories. Are consumers more or less likely to see a comedy when they’re happy? Compare consumer sentiment to box office receipts. Are there subtle atmospheric effects on a knuckleball pitch? Compare the result of every batter faced by a knuckleballer to the current hourly weather. When these huge information sources are unified, and people start building tools to explore their connections, there’s going to be a remarkable wealth of hidden insight — think Moneyball or Freakonomics, but for every pairing of knowledge domains.
Cheers,
flip at infochimps.org