Amazon’s now offering genomic, chemical, and economic data sets for use in their elastic storage service. You only pay for the compute resources you use to process them. If you have a public data set, you can submit it for inclusion.
Chris Neppes, over at Port80 Software, sent me a heads up on their monthly survey of what web server software the top 1,000 corporations use. They’re promoting the survey in response to some gloating by the Apache folks about their 63.98% share in the August 2003 Netcraft Survey. Port80 looked at the response headers from [...]
Consider this: The Oakland A’s, with a payroll of around 40 million, win as many or more games than the New York Yankees, whose payroll is over three times as large. Why did this happen? Billy Beane, the A’s general manager, has discovered three things: Bill James, arbitrage, and that the intuition of a Major [...]
[ via Davos Newbies ] In a article with the facinating title “Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms” you learn about the origin of graphs in science and engineering. From the abstract: L. J. Henderson, a Harvard physiologist and the first president of the History of Science Society, attempted to analyze mammalian blood solely as a physical-chemical [...]
What to do when someone starts using stats as a rhetorical weapon.
[ via Rebecca Blood ] I recommend this brilliant, LOL satire of Pascal’s famous wager: But as large as his bankroll grew, it only took three weeks to throw it all away. Looking for bigger scores, he started playing a modified Martingale in combination with the Argument From Design. In one terrible streak, Blaise lost [...]
The Limited Pie (whose banner with Chairman Greenspan in drag just creeps the heck out of me) introduces the notion of expected value to its readers. I will, however take the certain payoff of $9K. Risk is something you can pay to reduce, and I’m happy to pay $500 in LP’s example. The Pie is [...]
UNLV has a research center devoted to Gaming (that’s gambling to you and me). The center runs a Weblog.
Phil Agre collected hundreds of URLs related to the WTC/Pentagon attacks. All the URLs are now archived in one place.
[ via Urs Gehrig ] Java Analysis Studio is an class library for graphing data. It accepts data in XML format and can be embedded as an applet. It was developed by the BaBar experiment team at SLAC.
How bad did Eisenhower whup up on Stevenson in 1956? Not as badly as the Electorial College tally would make you think. Check out the historical and geographical atlas of US presidential elections to see how important the Electorial College can be.
Here’s a mathematical exposition on Benford’s Law, which describes the distribution of digits in non-random data.
The sidebar to a New York Times article on how Benford’s Law is used to detect fraud has a clear explaination of why it describes the frequency distribution of digits in non-random data.
Benford’s Law, which describes the frequency of digits in non-random data, is more than just an interesting emergent property of the natural word. Accountants and tax collectors now use it to look for fraud.
The zipf distribution, where log(frequency) = log(rank), used describe the size distribution of firms, and the popularity of web sites is related to Benford’s law, which describes the frequency distribution of digits in non-random data (prices, for example.) Interesting stuff.