Notes & Links by Casey A. Gollan on
art, design, creativity and technology on
statistics

 

As Matt from Signal vs. Noise has pointed out, Tynt is the name of a copy-and-paste tracking web service that many of us have been using whether we like it or not. I, personally, like it!

If you’ve copy and pasted, or even just selected text or images from The New Yorker, SFGate, or TMZ (among a growing number of sites) you’re being tracked by Tynt. The easily installable code tallies the most selected text and images across your site to show which exact content your audience is “engaging” with, definitely an interesting metric.

Also, at the end of your paste is inserted the text: “Read more:” with a link back to the article. I’ve encountered this a few times, not knowing what exactly it was but it’s actually useful. If you don’t want the link back you can just delete the trailing text, however, the link directs specifically to the point in the article you selected and highlights it, giving whoever clicks through a strong point of reference.

There are so many ways that messing with ubiquitous interactions like copy-and-paste can backfire, but this is pretty successful in my opinion. However, I would definitely advocate for adding the “Read More:” link to be an opt-in, or at least opt-out rather than default setting. The tracking portion (which is what’s most interesting to me anyway) is simply the right of the website publisher.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists are already claiming to be “[selecting text] more often on this site just to push some noise into their profile.”

Incredibly interesting interactive infographic (say that five times fast!) from the New York Times today:

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.

What I love most about it is the feeling that the information was, to most people, a useless spreadsheet before this beautiful execution.

Statistician Nate Silver on Gay Marriage

Nate Silver (who accurately predicted the election results in 49 states) has new models for gay marriage legalization:

He says that “voter initiatives to ban gay marriage are becoming harder and harder to pass every year” and uses a regression model to produce a listing of when the voters of each US state would vote against a marriage ban if given the chance. Some notables:

New York - 2009
Iowa - 2013
Utah - 2013
Kansas - 2015
Texas - 2018
Mississippi - 2024

(via Kottke)

The Long Tail, The Black Swan, and The Tipping Point

tedr:

mental concepts are very frequently fads no matter how valid they seem at the time. the sad thing is businesses have been built on all three of these principles.

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.
Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers - The McKinsey Quarterly - Hal Varian web challenge managers - Strategy - Innovation (via slantback) (via brocatus)

So many a second.

So Many a Second fills your computer screen with cascading graphic icons. Each one represents an event — a birth, a death, or one of the great many things in between — that’s occurring somewhere every single moment. It’s a simple, striking way to visualize otherwise abstract statistics.

You can make the site rain babies (4.2 are born each second), cell phones (27 are sold each second), cars (1.6 are produced each second), or stars (200 are born each second). The site’s least surprising stat? The thousands of porn searches that took place in the time it took you to read this sentence.

(via VSL)