Hat-tip to Institutional Economics blog for this link to a discussion about Earth hour and its insignificance.
Lets jump straight the conclusion the irrelevance of 2% in the normal variance is actually less than the Greens vote in the recent NSW state election.
The Greens got 8.15% for the legislative Council (equivalent to the senate), slightly less than the informal vote. The informal vote is actually a good indication of the number of people protest against having to vote, as it is compulsory to vote in Australian elections.
So does this means that people who vote for Green candidates actually are not really green at all?
Am I going to mine the data from the recent election, get a total primary vote for Green votes in Sydney?
no, I don't have to time and the data is not available in a nice format.
Here is the SQL I would run if I could...
select party,count(*)
from election_results_2007
where area = 'Sydney'
group by party order by 2;
Have Fun
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Gapminder the founder speaks
Many thanks to my mate James for the link.
I wrote an article about this great tool gapminder a while ago and this video is of gapminder's founder of sorts. He is talking about how the publicly funded data from UN sources shows a different picture to the one which is normally portrayed through the media.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Like I mentioned recently I want all countries to have low mortality rates and high per capita, more minds freed of poverty and subsistence and allowed to think, create and build.
As a database geek the ability to see trends in action in the data is awesome. The eye is one of the most developed senses, static pictures and graphs are nice, movement is better.
Think, evolution made the human and most predator's eyes very good at seeing and tracking movement. Having the data displayed in this manner plays to those deep strengths.
I have to think more about how we can move past the current use of database performance snapshots, and more into real time or snapshots shown over time.
Can you imagine watching the execution time of a specific sql over time against the growth of data. You would see any potentially scaling issues literally blasting off like rockets from the other sql which scales proportionally.
Have Fun
Like it? want to comment? blog it.
I wrote an article about this great tool gapminder a while ago and this video is of gapminder's founder of sorts. He is talking about how the publicly funded data from UN sources shows a different picture to the one which is normally portrayed through the media.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66
Like I mentioned recently I want all countries to have low mortality rates and high per capita, more minds freed of poverty and subsistence and allowed to think, create and build.
As a database geek the ability to see trends in action in the data is awesome. The eye is one of the most developed senses, static pictures and graphs are nice, movement is better.
Think, evolution made the human and most predator's eyes very good at seeing and tracking movement. Having the data displayed in this manner plays to those deep strengths.
I have to think more about how we can move past the current use of database performance snapshots, and more into real time or snapshots shown over time.
Can you imagine watching the execution time of a specific sql over time against the growth of data. You would see any potentially scaling issues literally blasting off like rockets from the other sql which scales proportionally.
Have Fun
Like it? want to comment? blog it.
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