2011 February

• Best companies to work for and what employees say

  February 3, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  Fortune Magazine recently published their annual list of top companies to work for, with SAS, Boston Consulting, and Wegman's taking the one, two, and three spots, respectively. To accompany the piece, this interactive, produced by Tommy McCall, shows what the employees have to say about their companies.
  Continue Reading

• Stock market predictions with Twitter

  February 3, 2011 to Statistics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  Apparently moods on Twitter can be used to predict the ups and downs of the stock market, according to work from Johan Bollen and Huina Mao of Indiana University-Bloomington: "Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent."

  I can't wait until Twitter is used to predict when I want to eat and sleep, and my robot can cook me gourmet meals and provide turn down service accordingly. And it better be accurate to the minute. Anything less is failure.

• Predicting crime before it happens

  February 3, 2011 to Statistics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  Christopher Beam for Slate explains research being done at UCLA in collaboration with the LAPD on predictive policing:

  Predictive policing is based on the idea that some crime is random—but a lot isn't. For example, home burglaries are relatively predictable. When a house gets robbed, the likelihood of that house or houses near it getting robbed again spikes in the following days. Most people expect the exact opposite, figuring that if lightning strike once, it won't strike again. "This type of lightning does strike more than once," says Brantingham. Other crimes, like murder or rape, are harder to predict. They're more rare, for one thing, and the crime scene isn't always stationary, like a house. But they do tend to follow the same general pattern. If one gang member shoots another, for example, the likelihood of reprisal goes up.

  This happened in my neighborhood when I was in fifth grade. We lived in a pretty quiet neighborhood, but one morning a window was open. Someone had come into our house while we were sleeping and stole whatever was in immediate reach. They also stole my dad's brand new bicycle from the garage. Same thing happened to my neighbor two days later.

  [Slate via @amstatnews]

• Bill Gates’ infographics section from annual letter

  February 2, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (12)

  

  Even Bill Gates has an infographics section. In his 2011 annual letter, Gates focuses on Polio and vaccines, and uses graphics to highlight spots. Most of them have to do with the decrease in number of Polio cases and increase in vaccine coverage, but there's one graph that I gave a double take. It shows the correlation between IQ and disease burden. Question of the day: if we decrease disease burden in a country by improving healthcare (or availability of vaccines), will the country as a whole become smarter, or are better educated people generally healthier?

  [Gates Foundation | Thanks, Michael]

• Chart doesn’t work for colorblind

  February 2, 2011 to Design  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (12)

  

  In regards to a performance chart posted by Netflix, Andy Baio, who along with around 7 percent of men, is colorblind, explains why it's so hard to read the chart. "When doing the right thing is this easy, it's really disturbing when it's dismissed as a waste of time."

  [Waxy]

• A history of Coen brothers filmography

  February 1, 2011 to Infographics  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (4)

  

  I post this graphic by Muller on the Coen brothers filmography mostly because, well, of the Coen brothers filmography. I also kind of like the name. Main characters are shown from most recent on down and connecting lines show previous Coen films that actor was in.

  [Muller | Thanks, Thomas]