STATISTICA Blogs

Next Sunday, February 5, the New York Giants and the New England Patriots will play in Super Bowl XLVI. I’m not a huge American football fan, but I do typically watch the Super Bowl, just so I can keep up with pop culture and to hear what kind of music the kids are listening to these days.

I took a trip through Super Bowls past on Wikipedia. I played with the data in several ways, but these Categorized Pie Charts were my favorite. I had hoped to make a prediction of who would win the game based on the location of the game, but unfortunately the Super Bowl has never been played in Indiana before.  

Do you ever wake up and say “I want to find some interesting data today”? 

Rather than acknowledge the fact that I might be the only geek here, I’ll just assume the answer is yes.

I knew the monthly jobs report was due out today, but I’ve already written about how “good” job report news isn’t always as positive as it seems on the surface.  

So I looked elsewhere and ended up at the World Bank. I drilled down to the Gender Statistics database and selected all the countries that were available in the list. Two of the interesting items were “Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments” and “Wage equality between...

 As a result of the Occupy Wall Street Movement bringing concerns about income inequality to the news cycle, my goal was to find data related to this topic. I didn’t have an agenda, really – I just wanted to be able to confirm or deny whether their claims are legitimate. 

Of course, the data were easy to get. It’s found here at the Census Bureau’s website. It shows mean income for each Fifth of households on an annual basis from 1967 to 2010. All values are shown in 2010 dollars, which adjusts for changes in purchasing power over time. 

 I can definitely relate to the last blog post from my colleague Jennifer Thompson, for I too have a common name for people in my age cohort. I was so tired of having to clarify which Amanda I was that I so desperately wanted to coin the nickname “Shank” for myself. It didn’t catch on for some reason.

You can check out for yourself using Social Security Administration data how common your first name was for US babies born the same year you were. There are 2010 data available as well as yearly data going back to 1880.  Name Voyager is also a fun one to look at for expectant parents and narcissists alike. 

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I took an Intro to Statistics course in the Psychology Department at the University of Oklahoma. I am so happy I took this class, both because it helped me start out on the somewhat squiggly path to working at StatSoft and because it was a great foundation for understanding experimental research, probability, statistical significance, correlation vs. causation, and other concepts that are generally useful for a functioning adult to know.  

We did old-school pencil and paper graphing in that class. Not only because the printer that the department used for printing out statistical output was the next building over and the size of an office, but because it helped us get some hands-on understanding of what types of graphs are used when. 

 

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