State of Data Last Week - Aug 29

Cool Numbers – Want your kid to play in Major League some day? Move to a smaller city!

• 52% of US population lives in metropolitan areas (>0.5M people), but such cities only produce 13% of players in NHL; 29% in NBA; 15% in MLB; and 13% in PGA. (Wonderful causal analysis)
• Want the stock market to move up? Fast! Stock market returns in predominantly Muslim countries are almost 9x higher during Ramadan than other times.
• What rises twice a year - once in Easter, and then 2 weeks before Christmas; has a mini-peak every Monday and then flattens out over the summer? Peak break-up windows (according to analysis of vast Facebook updates)
• CEOs speak ~107% more than CFOs. And be careful of “extreme positive emotions words” (like, ‘fantastic’) (Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls – latest paper from Stanford GSB using statistical modeling on lots of quarterly earning calls)

Cary Millsap, Performance Guru, explains in ACM why “99% of the X workflow executions should finish under 100ms” is a better requirement statement than “the average response time should be 200ms”.

“CouchDB – The Definitive Guide” book is now available FREE! Chapters on “Eventual Consistency” (with a case study) is recommended (Hadron Collider uses CouchDB)

3 rules of thumb for using Bloom Filter – “..add 1024 elements to 1KB bloom filter, ..with ~2% false positive rates”.

O’Reilly Strata (‘The Business of Data’) Conference Call is now open (Feb 1-3, 2011)

Data Visualization – Stock heat map of performance of common stocks traded on Nasdaq (Thanks to Karin!)

What’s the solution to “Data Glut” or information overload? Use your eyes more! David McCandless explains in TedTalk why in the month of April there’s a media surge on reports on violent video games.

Best Science and Health Infographics from New York Times (Social web of Smokers and Measure of a President are cool)

Cocktail party cheat-sheet – “Data is the new oil soil” – the new fertile medium.
Why Trader Joe’s is so different? It stores less than 4000 SKUs compared to 50,000 SKUs stored by typical grocery stores. So, it sells $1,750 worth of items/sq ft (2x of Whole Foods).
Same magnitude earthquakes will kill up to 200x less in a democratic country than in dictatorships.

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