Free Credit Reports DATA: What could be a better time to be thinking of your credit than right before throwing down more then you can afford on Christmas? Well, you can get your credit report for free starting tomorrow (Tuesday, December 1st) if you live in a Western state.



(When was the last time the West got something first? I'm still waiting for the god damn quarters to get past Wisconsin. Washington State will get its quarter in 2007, that's the 9th year of a 10 year program. If we still want to give New Mexico back to Old Mexico or get our $7.2 million back from Russia, we should do so now, before we honor them with a shiny quarter in 2008. And while we're giving things away, let's give Texas back to Mexico or let them go back to being the Republic of Texas.)

But anyway, get your free credit copy right away and make it a yearly tradition to do so. Now, if we could get congress to require credit companies fess up about how they calculate your FICO score... Or better yet, someone should make a website that collects individuals' FICO scores and then use the data to reverse engineer the calculation scheme.

UPDATE: Dear idiot Texan (and perennial commenter) Mark. Stop making all Texans look bad.

Texas was its own independent country before it joined the union (remember the Alamo?), and we still have the right to subdivide into four more (for a total of 5) states.

If you're trying to be funny, you should at least be accurate.

Or better yet, maybe the west coast should secede, or join Canada.

Read my post again, I talked explicitly about the Republic of Texas. I quote, "let's give Texas back to Mexico or let them go back to being the Republic of Texas." And yes, Texas was part of Mexico before it was an independent country. Apparently you don't remember the Alamo that well at all. So, I'm not sure I understand what you don't think is accurate. Perhaps you misread my post; perhaps you're just a complete moron.

And who cares anyway? Your inability to stomach my political commentary is absurd. So, I'm turning off anonymous posting until you grow up and/or stop reading my blog. Feel free to continue to comment, but do it in a way that I can respond to you directly, rather then on the front page. Thanks for good times, kiddo.  ¶ 11:37 AM 1 Comments

  White Elephants Breed Like Rabbits INFO VISUALIZATION: I ran across an interesting hypothesis while running through Andrew Sullivan.



I have many issues with this chart and with the authors spurious conclusions. But rather then rehash them, you can read a comment on the article here.

My main problem with the article is the author seems to believe this to be a relationship of causation, rather then just association. Long story short, association is not automatically causation, but the author makes a lot of assumptions to the contrary.

Also, he attempts to take on Thomas Frank, but fails miserably. He writes:

In a year of predictably partisan books, one lively surprise has been What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, a leftwing journalist from Kansas who now lives with his wife and single child in the Democratic stronghold of Chicago. [...]

While the Christian right in Kansas doesn't much hold with Darwin, they are doing well at the basic Darwinian task of reproducing themselves: pro-life Kansas has the fourth highest white fertility in the country at 2.06 babies per woman, and the birthrate of the conservative Republicans that Frank finds so baffling is likely to be even higher. On the crucial question of whether a group can be bothered not to die out, "What's the Matter with Massachusetts?" would be a more pertinent question. Massachusetts' whites are failing to replace themselves, averaging only 1.6 babies per woman, and the states' liberal Democrats are probably reproducing even less than that.

What ignorance. Someone needs to inform this guy that California is the biggest state and one of the fastest growing and a liberal stronghold. Oh yeah, and that white democrats aren't the only democrats.

Kansas? Take a look at this map and tell me the democrats have anything to fear about the rapid growth of Kansas. (It's above Texas and Oklahoma.)



Yeah, it's the one where at least two thirds of its counties have a shrinking population. And here's a bit of history: Kansas had 11 electoral votes in 1932. Now it has 6. I don't imagine those 717,507 Kansas Bush voters have liberals shaking in their boots.  ¶ 4:06 PM 0 Comments

  Balance With Your Tongue INFO SCIENCE: It always nice to read a story about the amazing abilities of the human brain. We spend so much time in them, it's easy to forget they are the most versatile and resilient information systems of all time.

Ms. Schiltz and other patients like her are the beneficiaries of an astonishing new technology that allows one set of sensory information to substitute for another in the brain.

Using novel electronic aids, vision can be represented on the skin, tongue or through the ears. If the sense of touch is gone from one part of the body, it can be routed to an area where touch sensations are intact. Pilots confused by foggy conditions, in which the horizon disappears, can right their aircraft by monitoring sensations on the tongue or trunk. Surgeons can feel on their tongues the tip of a probe inside a patient's body, enabling precise movements.

For any readers that want to read more, I recommend all of Oliver Sacks' books.  ¶ 4:17 PM 0 Comments

  "Excuse Me" OFF TOPIC: A picture is worth... Ok, I hate that hackneyed expression. But still, I could come up with a five hundred word essay about this picture if I had to. It's just that awesome.



This is what happens when big-headed men -- men who haven't said "no, after you" to anyone since their inauguration speeches -- come upon a door. They squish through, all at once, with confused looks on their faces.

Meanwhile Bush Sr. patiently waits in the background for his two two-term successors to battle out who gets to go first. Well, Clinton does, silly. Bush may be the new Come Back Kid, but Clinton has a way of shrinking him back down to that whiny frat-boy just by being in the same room. The guy has presence.

UPDATE: Yet another priceless photo-op thanks to the New York Times:



Look at the Clintons. Go ahead, look at them. Wow. What a sexy god damn family. This picture would be perfect, if it weren't for that mysterious Bush head/neck problem thing going on there. Is it about to fall off?  ¶ 9:21 AM 2 Comments

  Google Scholar INFO SCIENCE: Another great tool from Google, Google Scholar searches stuff like peer-reviewed papers, books, and the like.

Hey, look, it's my brother's paper, "Solvent-resistant photocurable liquid fluoropolymers for microfluidic device fabrication." Those chemists, always making everyone else feel dumb. ;-)  ¶ 10:08 AM 1 Comments

  30 Million Newspaper Pages Online INFO SCIENCE: The Library of Congress is putting 30,000,000 newspaper pages online over the next several years.

The government promises anyone with a computer will have access within a few years to millions of pages from old newspapers, a slice of American history to be viewed now only by visiting local libraries, newspaper offices or the nation's capital.

The first of what's expected to be 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 will be available in 2006.

I must say, this is awesome. However, the current interface leaves a bit to be desired.  ¶ 9:59 AM 0 Comments

  World Doesn't Trust Politicians Data: Global feelings about business and government are shown to be pretty poor in a recently conducted global survey.

Worldwide, 63 percent of the 50,000 people questioned believe politicians are dishonest while 43 percent think the same term applies to business leaders, according to the survey, titled "The Voice of the People."

Some 52 percent feel politicians behave unethically, and 39 percent believe the same of business chiefs. But while 39 percent think politicians are not capable or competent, only 22 percent viewed their business counterparts in the same way.

Least trusted by their peoples, the survey indicated, are the political leaders of Latin America, West Asia and Africa with dishonesty ratings of 87 percent for the first, 84 percent for the second and 82 percent for the third.

Although in Western Europe as a whole 46 percent of the survey sample described their politicians as dishonest, in Germany 76 percent held that view, while 70 percent of Germans thought business leaders were dishonest too.

Hmmm, I wonder what kind of confidence interval this study has. A quick and dirty calculation shows that they sampled 0.0000083% of the population size. In other words, each person surveyed represents 120,482(*) peoples' opinions.

This sounds more like research looking for trends rather then looking for a precise figure of public sentiment.

Update: Migurski comments:

One thing to remember is that the relative confidence level of a truly random sample increases quickly with population size at first, then much more slowly. Or, as my intro-to-stats professor explained in college: if you know your sample is random, you may never need more than 1000 data points to represent any size population.

So the question is: how did they choose survey participants?

Good point. I wonder how one goes about finding a truley radom sampling of the entire population of the planet? I'm glad I didn't work on that study. :-)  ¶ 9:33 AM 2 Comments

  TiVo / Congress Suxx0rz INFO TECHNOLOGY: Want to skip TV commercials? Then you're going to have to skip Tivo too. The company has decided that your Tivo interface is a great spot for banner ads. Ugh, banner ads, the most annoying and ineffective ads on Earth. Wtf Tivo?

Coming soon to the standalone TiVo OS: when you hit fast forward to skip past commercials, small banner ads will show up on your screen. You'll be able to click them to get more info, see an infomercial, or send your home address details to get more info about a product mailed to you.

I was thinking of buying a new Tivo for Christmas, but I sure won't consider it anymore.

In other news, the MPAA is pressuring congress to make fastforwarding through commercials illegal.

Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.

Well, if either of these stories comes to pass, it'll be a good day to be a BitTorrent user. Honestly, it's like the MPAA and Television industry wants to drive their customers away. We all know how well being unabashedly anti-customers has worked out for the RIAA.  ¶ 11:13 AM 0 Comments

  GIS Bonanza! VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Well, it's been a few days since I last blogged. Basically, I've been busy with a big project of my own (I'll be posting deliverables here as they become available), class work and work work.

While I've been seeing the litany of election visualizations out there, I didn't want to just re-blog the already blogged-to-death. But I found these comprehensive visualizations a few days back and thought they were interesting. Of course, they were presented in Flash (ugh) so I stripped them out and put them here in Jpg format.

So, in short, if you want GIS readouts, you gott'em baby. If you don't have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the US by the end of this post, I've failed! ;-)











Richest Counties (By average wage):

Poorest Counties (By % below poverty line):










Voting Type:





  ¶ 11:10 AM 0 Comments

  Red State, Blue State INFO VISUALIZATION: BoingBoing posts this map:

Reader Jeff Culver in Seattle says:

"I was thinking today about how the 'red v. blue' states graphic is really misleading considering the slim margins that the candidates won some of those states by, so I sat down and created the map that's attached. In the dozens of hours I've been watching the news I haven't seen one like it, but thought that you and the BoingBoing readers might find it interesting. I think it definitely portrays our fellow states far differently than the extreme way we've been seeing to date."

The winner take all electoral college has to go.  ¶ 9:12 AM 3 Comments

  The 5 Stages of Grief ASSEMBLEME:

* DENIAL
* ANGER
* BARGAINING
* DEPRESSION
* ACCEPTANCE

I think I hit acceptance this morning. Back to your regularly scheduled blog...  ¶ 8:42 AM 6 Comments

  Dems and Divorce Data DATA: The Boston Globe is running an op-ed that shows the hypocrisy of the Bible Belt lecturing the rest of the country about the sanctity of marriage.

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.

But don't take the US government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group. George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states. More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.

The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that "the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Again, sorry for the light posting. With the election, my personal project, educational projects, and work I've been a little too busy for blog land. I'll be back again shortly.  ¶ 11:04 AM 2 Comments