Learn & Tell

j

• source

Can’t really see the seal, but take a look at how high the shark makes it out of the water!

It only touches on the Farmer’s Market, but its fun to see: Thursday Night Farmer’s Market

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?

Anyone interested in this purchase? I can think of much better ways to spend almost half a million dollars…

A man steps over a part of the Moscow Panorama, constructed by over 300 workers in 1977, in Moscow, Monday, July 31, 2006. The panorama draws swarms of sightseers from around the world. But the company that now owns the 16-meter (50-foot) wide model of the city center said it doesn’t have the money to maintain it, and has put it up for auction at a US$380,000 (euro 300,000) starting price. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

• Source: Yahoo News

As of tomorrow, Learn & Tell will have been on the web for only two weeks. Because of successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices such as a Google Sitemap plugin and a few submissions to digg, some interesting content, and a little luck, people all around the world have read articles on Learn & Tell. I’m a bit amazed how quickly it spreads, but hopefully this is just the beginning!

Unique visitors to site in first two weeks: 319
Total number of visits: 394
Average number of visits per day: 28.14
Number of pageviews: 933
Average number of pageviews per day: 66.64
Here’s a graph of the people from around the world that have viewed Learn & Tell:

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