“statistics”
27 posts under this tag.
Vaya que es sorprendente. Curiosamente, me entere de esto en The Economist, no se que tanta difusion se le haya dado en periodicos nacionales pero mi familia no estaba enterada.
At first glance it would be easy to dismiss Mr López Obrador’s actions as the inconsequential tantrums of a sore loser who was never able to substantiate his charge of electoral fraud. Certainly most of his fellow countrymen seem to take this view. But a substantial minority do not. A poll commissioned recently by the independent electoral authority found that 37% of respondents believed that fraud took place. Many of those would doubtless prefer a constructive opposition to constant rabble-rousing. Mr López Obrador’s party has plenty of reasonable leaders who have indicated that they will work with Mr Calderón. The “shadow government” is made up of second-tier figures.
El IFE (“the independent electoral authority”) publica aquella encuesta como la Evaluación de la gestión institucional a la luz del Proceso Federal Electoral 2005-2006 (Parametría).
 ” Hay varias otras gemas en esta encuesta a 2,000 personas del 8 al 12 de Septiembre del 2006, como el que 38.6% de los encuestados afirme que no participaria en futuras elecciones (aunque 76.6% esta muy o algo de acuerdo en que “La democracia puede tener problemas, pero es el mejor sistema de gobierno”) o el que la mitad (!) de los encuestados afirmo haber votado por Felipe Calderon, que los partidos politicos son considerados tanto la institucion politica mas corrupta del pais como la menos importante para el desarrollo del pais, que la principal razon (15.9%) por la que se cree que hubo fraude es la tardanza de los resultados, que 47.1% esta muy o algo de acuerdo con la frase “No me importa un gobierno NO democrático en el poder si logra mejorar mi nivel de vida”, que 43.6% cree que es mejor vivir en una “sociedad que respete derechos/libertades aunque haya desorden”, que un 40.8% esta muy en desacuerdo con las acciones de resistencia civil que promueve AMLO mientras que solo un 13% esta muy de acuerdo con ellas…
When they arrived in his office and Abir explained the concept for what is now called the decoder, Carbonell was floored by its elegance. “In the few weeks that followed, I kept wondering, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t the rest of the field think of that?’ Finally I said, Enough of this envy. If I can’t beat them, join them.”
I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.
Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.
Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.
Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)
Esta va por que por a la mayoría de nosotros Jalisquillos al hablar de Guadalajara (pensando en la ZMG) nos da por decir que es una ciudad de 7 millones y pico de personas, y esto, para mi inacabable sorpresa, no es cierto. La Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara (ZMG)WP generalmente se considera comprendida por los municipios de Guadalajara, Zapopan, Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, y El Salto. Según el INEGI en su conteo de población por municipio Jalisciense, 2005:
| Guadalajara | 1,600,940 |
| Zapopan | 1,155,790 |
| Tonalá | 408,729 |
| Tlaquepaque | 563,006 |
| Tlajomulco de Zuñiga | 220,630 |
| El Salto | 111,436 |
| ZMG | 4,060,531 |
(Jalisco mismo tiene apenas 6,752,113 habitantes—INEGI: Población por Estado al 2005.)
(Y ya de pasada, los Guzmanenses siempre andan diciendo que su ciudad tendra unas 250 o 300 mil personas cuando resulta que ni siquiera llega a 100 mil—el municipio de Zapotlan el Grande del que Guzman es cabecera tiene apenas 96,050 habitantes.)
In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffieWP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRankWP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).
No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and AlexaWP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.
I can’t remember where I got this notion that Google Finance was just an uninteresting, me-too product1 from Google, but the prejudice set in without my noticing (as, alas, so many do) and it was strong enough that I hadn’t deigned to pay them a visit until I chanced upon them today.
Here are some screenshots of both Google Finance and Yahoo Finance (the current king of the hill) set to display Google’s stock information. There’s simply no comparison: Google outshines Yahoo “in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.”EEM
1 Perhaps it filtered somehow from the popularish blog GigaOM, who to my utter amazement finds Google Finance “downright tiresome and plain ugly.. clearly.. a me-too move.”
In a surprising study, Jakob Nielsen found out most (85%) of the learning gleaned from usability tests came from your first 5 user tests; 3 users tests will still give you a whopping 67% of the learning there is. He then goes on to advocate small and iterative testing over a single massive one (say, three tests with 3 users each and improvements in between instead of one lone test with 9):
You want to run multiple tests because the real goal of usability engineering is to improve the design and not just to document its weaknesses.
Combine that with Joshua Schachter’s, founder of Del.icio.us, idea of “Starbucks usability tests” (“offer someone coffee to sit down and play with your product.”) and you’ll know why I’ll be this Friday on Minerva’s Starbucks harassing three every pretty girl I can find with Domburi (TeenVogue recently had a feature on young fashionistas being excellent for usability tests, can’t find the link though).
As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.
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