Category: Staturday

STATurday: Visualizing the MBTA

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trainsEarlier this month a couple of dedicated Worcester Polytechnic Institute students put together some visualizations of Boston’s MBTA’s movement of people around the city. They have charts showing the on-time performance of trains. They have interactive items to see where your particular commute falls in the grand scheme of things. And they have all the stations ranked by how busy they are with people going in and out.

Few things to note: This data is for 1 month: February 2014. There is no info on the Green Line (not provided by the MBTA — They’re probably afraid to see how bad it really is) or the Commuter Rail (they focused on subway), which is sad, because I think those 2 lines are some of the worst offenders.

If you’re a software person and really want to know how these guys got this all set up, check out their handout.

STATurday: Looking For A Job

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Today’s STATurday is about looking for a job. This is from a survey of over 1200 people about their plans for looking for a new job. The biggest surprise is how often people keep their résumé up to date. If you haven’t switched jobs in a few years, do you really need to make updates every week?

Infographic

For the full article, visit Fast Company.

STATurday: Correlation does not equal causation

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I found a whole site of charts showing some crazy correlations on data. Check it out:

Nic Cage
If Nicolas cage is in less movies, fewer people will die. At least that’s what I’m seeing here.

Or perhaps this one:

Cheese consumption graph
“Why are you eating all that cheese?” “I’m doing my part to better educate America!”

I think by now you should be realizing the point of this site. If you want to see more, or even hook it into your RSS reader, check out Spurious Correlations.

STATurday: Hip Hopping

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For this week’s STATurday entry, here are a few posts by nerd Matt Daniels that breakdown some lyrical accomplishments of hip hop artists.

First up is his study on The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop, which breaks down the number of different words used by rappers in their songs. The East Coast wins:

regional vocabulary

Next we jump in to just one word, Shorty, and how it came to mean “a fine ass woman, or your girl,” when it started very differently.

meaning of shorty

And finally, a dive into Outkast and how these southernplayas have affected some commonly used slang.

 

STATurday: Smart Spending

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Glove with money
Money Ball?

Last week, Businessweek published a fun tool for calculating what they call an “efficiency index.” This is what there using to figure out how much a team spends per win and how that compares to the league average. They are taking into account playoff and championship wins as a multiplier value compared to regular season wins. That multiplier is what you can adjust. You can set it to only show a single league, say MLB, and start increasing the value of post-season wins. Watch as the Marlins plummet from the top as the Yankees begin their climb.

Check it out: Smartest Spenders in Sports 2014