Data Land For Y'all Nerds Out there
Trendiest baby names in the Social Security database (determined with an analytical chemistry technique) A few attempts have been made to determine the trendiest baby names in the U.S. Social Security Administration database; FlowingData, for example, looked at the quickest rises and falls, and determined that Catina was the most flash-in-the-pan name; however, at its peak, … Read more Trendiest baby names in social security
Graphing the problematic aspects of the U.S. Baby Names dataset Every time I post about the popular U.S. Social Security Administration baby names dataset, I try to acknowledge the fact that there are some serious problems with it — and by “problems”, I mean things the average person unfamiliar with it will assume are true, … Read more Graphing Problematic Aspects of us baby
If you prefer, you can watch this as a GIF or on YouTube. The animation above shows all earthquakes with epicenters in the bounded area and magnitudes greater than 5.0. The first slide says “Richter scale” because that’s most familiar to most people, but the actual scale used was the Moment Magnitude Scale; it’s generally within a few decimals … Read more Animated map of earthquakes near China and Japan, 1970-2013
Spoiler alert: there’s only a 0.1% chance any given 1-800 number will be found in pi or tau. What’s tau, you ask? Tau is two times pi, or as mathematicians like to put i, τ = 2 π. It turns out that in many endeavors, 2π is a more useful number in calculations than π. pi … Read more Pi vs. tau: Ultimate Smackdown
The five[1] commandments[2] of data visualization[3] I’m nobody special in the world of data viz; I have no profound observations or innovations to add to those of the likes of Edward Tufte, Hans Rosling, Hadley Wickham or Mike Bostock; but I think I have a little common sense and boots-on-the-ground experience when it comes to the more mundane, journeyman work of making … Read more The five commandments (and fifteen footnotes) of data visualization
In 2007, arguably the foremost statistician-cum-maven concerning the U.S. Social Security Administration’s baby name database, Laura Wattenberg*, appears to be the first to have noticed quite a dramatic trend, the rise of boys’ names ending in “n” from about 15% in the 1950s to around 35% now. A few weeks ago, I made an animated gif to visualize … Read more Skyrocketing of boys names ending in ‘n’ is not reflected in the most popular names overall