Learn & Tell

j

• source

For the graphs below, I was most curious about PHP, MySQL, Java, and ASP.NET.

Found this graph of O’Reilly book sales:

And then did this search for job trends:

Java, as suspected, is clearly the winner in both categories. What I thought was interesting was that, in terms of book sales, PHP sales are more steady than Java books and are currently about half of what Java sales are. But if you look at job trends, Java is dominantly and consistently approximately four times as more prevalent. So based on these fairly off-the-cuff metrics, I would guess that there’s people out there learning PHP for their own purposes, their own startups (ie. digg is PHP), etc.

Make of it what you will. I like the numbers.

Two interesting and related articles I recently read that got me thinking about massive redundancy, power consumption, and the move toward less power-needy CPUs. The move toward more efficient CPUs means less focus on clock rate, which is a fundamental shift in the way we’ve looked at R&D for CPUs historically.

Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes
Source: Wired’s article on cloudware

And I’m sure this won’t seem like much in the near future. There’s a 1-terabyte hard drive coming out soon or possibly its already out and I’m behind the times yet again.

That’s one exciting thing about this field of technology: constant, 24 hour, ceaseless innovation and evolution. Just 20 years ago I had a Commodore 64. It was called a 64 because it had 64K of RAM. For a refresher course, after Kilobytes comes Megabytes, then Gigabytes (my MacBook hard drive now is 80GB), then Terabytes, then Petabytes (Google houses approximately 200 petabytes), then Exabytes. And I don’t even know (right now) what is after that, but I’m sure we’ll be there sooner than we think. So much information.

What delights me about so much information, so much data, is the chance to analyze the data for trends never before realized in the history of mankind. From the mundane (what time do most people watch videos of dogs skateboarding) to the more business-oriented intelligence (how many times does a person look at a product before they buy), this stuff is interestng. And, to get a bit more lofty, perhaps it reveals that as a global community, human beings aren’t all that different from one another. Same lumps of flesh with different nooks and crannies and variances, but basically the same computers in our skulls…

And this other article is about the dangers of data corruption. What would happen if Google lost its massive redundancy and lost all of that information? Sure, the web could be scoured again, sure this information is hidden elsewhere. But what about a massive power failure and critical hard drive corruption and, what the founder of CouchSurfing.com describes as “the perfect storm” of irretrievable data loss. Here is his letter of regret about how two negligent System Administrators managed to bring down a business with 90,000 registered users overnight:

TechCrunch DeadPool: Couchsurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down

Imagine if the web went down, even for a day. How would you look up a phone number? Find driving directions? Buy a new book? Read the news? I guess you’d have to go take a walk and tend to your garden.

Mmm, more data. Take a look at this article, The State of the Blogosphere from David Sifry of Technorati.

There’s some very interesting graphs and charts to peruse. Especially interesting to me were these two:

This indicates that English is the dominant blogging language on the web, but that Japanese is a close second.

And this next one indicates that English speakers perhaps blog while at work, while Japanese are more likely to do so before or after work. Of course, this statement doesn’t take into account the likely large number of students who are blogging.

Read the article for more interesting data crunching.

Mmmm, data.

The PDFs linked below have a lot of math in them, but the data they reveal can be intriguing.

New York Times
In regards to the New York Times sample, 330,000 New York Times articles over 3 years (2000-2002) were analyzed.

For this 2000-2002 period, the most frequently mentioned people were: George Bush; Al Gore; Bill Clinton; Yasser Arafat; Dick Cheney and John McCain. In total, more than 100,000 unique persons, organizations and
locations were extracted.

In relation to the sport of basketball, these were the top 5 most frequent mentions of people or organizations:

1. Lakers
2. Shaquille O’Neal
3. Kobe Bryant
4. Phil Jackson
5. NBA

For the holidays, the top 5 most frequent mentions of people, items, or organizations:

1. Christmas
2. Thanksgiving
3. Santa Claus
4. Barbie
5. Hanukkah
6. Mattel
7. Grinch
8. Hallmark
9. Easter
10. Hasbro

I thought it interesting that for the holidays, 40% of the most frequent mentions were brands (ie. Mattel, Barbie, etc).

Here are some graphs in relation to term frequency and time of year:

US Senate
This data covers the 105th-108th Senate from 1997-2004. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one is much longer and less interesting. To me, at least. But I did find some interesting things.

For example, look at the red line below. It is the mentions of “Defense” in terms of “Use of force”. It is steadily declining and then rapidly shoots back up. That abrupt shot straight up is right after 9/11. You might want to look at the original graph on page 53, but here it is:

The top ten topics were:

1. Judicial Nominations
2. Supreme Court / Constitutional
3. Campaign Finance
4. Abortion
5. Law & Crime 1 [Violence/Drugs]
6. Child Protection
7. Health 1 [Medical]
8. Social Welfare
9. Education
10. Armed Forces 1 [Manpower]

See the PDF for the full list:

• New York Times Text Mining Data (PDF)
• US Senate Text Mining Data (PDF)

I happened to catch the Colbert report the other night when Stephen Colbert was defining “Wikiality” as a new reality. He argues, for example, that if you want to say that the Panama Canal opened in 1941, not 1914, that’s your right. And now, with wikipedia, you can. It was hilarious stuff.

Video here:

Then today I see this article from the Wikimania conference about the $100 laptop:

A few minutes ago here at the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as one of the first elements in their content repository. (ac: though they’ve been talking about this for at least a year.)

• Source: Jimmy Wales Announces $100 Laptop Partnership, Wikiversity, Wikiwyg

One might wonder what the impacts might be to Wikipedia. Global Wikiality? Stephen, are you listening?

The fact that ebay is not allowing meebome on its listings sounds a LOT like what they did against PayPal way back when. And PayPal fought long and hard and users liked PayPal better than the ebay payment system. Eventually, ebay just bought PayPal. But since ebay already owns Skype, and Skype is so well-established, do you think that ebay may also buy meebome? Maybe only if the meebome user base grows substantially to be a real competitor with Skype… The technology is reproducible…

• Link: eBay rejects Meebome, saying it is against policy

Women were found on average to own 6.6 technology devices while men own 6.9, and four out of every five women felt comfortable using technology with 46 percent doing their own computer trouble-shooting.

The study found 77 percent of women surveyed would prefer a new plasma television to a diamond solitaire necklace and 56 percent would opt for a new plasma TV over a weekend vacation in Florida.

Not my girl! I hope she’d choose the vacation!

• Source: Technology is a girl’s best friend: study

These are some interesting photos of World War I in color.

Although color photography was around prior to 1903, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, patented the process in 1903 and developed the first color film in 1907. The French army was the primary source of color photos during the course of World War One.

Here are just a few of them:

• Source: worldwaronecolorphotos.com

Just a coincidence I suppose, but I received some photos via email of jets breaking the sound barrier today. I say its a coincidence because I just recently posted some amazing photos of other military-type stuff. Anyway, here they are: