Culture Archive

9 Fascinating Datasets Available Online for Free

By Dan Zambonini, May 22, 2010, 3:59 am in Culture, Present

Data is invaluable for our continued advancement as a society. We use it to decide which hospitals to attend, which foods to eat, what career to take. We can learn incredible lessons from the past, and make vast sums of money from predicting future trends.

As individuals, we are lucky to have access to more data than ever before, as data sets continue to be made available online for free.

Primarily as an excuse to let you know about the amazing Infochimps website (that catalogues datasets and makes them available), here are some interesting data sets that you might want to explore:

  1. 500,000 email messages from Enron senior management
  2. 500,000+ US pager intercepts from the 9/11
  3. Frequency of Sex versus Satisfaction Levels
  4. Meat Consumption by Type and Country
  5. The Location of Michael Jackson’s White Glove in 10,000+ Video Frames
  6. Drug Use by Arrestees in Major U.S. Cities
  7. Characters from Baywatch
  8. 1,000 Most Frequently Used English Words by Frequency
  9. UFO Reports, by city, shape, duration
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Using Starbucks Stores to Model Retail Gravitation

By Dan Zambonini, May 18, 2010, 8:01 pm in Business, Culture, Present, Psychology

Retail Gravitation Breakpoint for Manchester and London

You live the same distance away from two cities and decide to go shopping – which do you go to; the one with the most stores, right? What if you didn’t live the same distance away from each city – how far would you have to be away from the larger one, in order to decide that it’s easier just to go to the smaller, closer one?

That question is the crux of William J. Reilly’s 1931 Law of Retail Gravitation. He asserted that:

the Break Point (BP) [from city p2] is equal to the Distance (d) between two places, divided by the following: 1 plus the Square Root of, the size of Place One (p1) divided by the size of Place Two (p2). (slightly paraphrased from the previous Wikipedia link)

The “size” of a place is a little arbitrary, but you could use figures such as the total square-footage of retail space, or the total number of unique stores. Either way, this data is fairly difficult to track down.

Luckily, ubiquitous stores like Starbucks are a good indicator of the larger retail environment, so we can use their UK Store Locator to count the total number of Starbucks stores in each city, and use this as a good estimate for ‘Retail Size’.

Retail Break Points for UK Cities, compared with London

Obviously the Break Point figure, in miles, will be larger for the cities that are further away from London, such as the Scottish cities. Therefore a more interesting statistic is the Break Point distance in terms of percentage of the total distance (the green line in the graph above). This demonstrates the relative ‘pull’ of each city, influenced by the number of Starbucks (which, remember, we’re using to represent the total number of stores). Looking at these figures, we can see how the lack of Starbucks in Liverpool is causing a relatively low ‘retail pull’ towards the city, whereas the additional Starbucks stores in Manchester give it almost the same relative ‘pull’ as the much farther away Edinburgh.

Just because I had the data, here’s a bonus graph of People per Starbucks for each city:

People per Starbucks Store, for UK Cities

Looks like Liverpool and Birmingham need a few more stores.

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Noah Webster – ‘Father’ of the American Copyright System

By Amy Thibodeau, May 14, 2010, 7:47 pm in Culture, Language, Past

Noah Webster is best known for his role in cementing a distinct American culture through his changes to English language conventions and spelling following the American Revolution. Webster believed in that in order to prosper as an independent nation, America needed to embrace a culture distinct from its British colonial roots. He set about contributing to this by adapting the spelling of common words and including around 12,000 new words into his dictionary, which is now the standard in use across the USA. Major grammar and spelling changes attributed to Webster include changing most words with an -our ending in British spelling (i.e. honour) to an -or spelling in America (i.e. honor); he also changed most -ise word endings (i.e. apologise) to have -ize endings (i.e. apologize).

Although Webster borrowed liberally from the popular British-convention dictionaries of his time, once he had created and published his own opus, he wanted to protect his intellectual property. Webster was mainly concerned with publishers who, at the time, were permitted to reprint entire books without seeking the permission of the author and without providing them with any compensation.

In the 1700s the Federal government of the United States did not hold a lot of oversight over laws in the various states and the area of copyright was no exception. As such, when he began campaigning for copyright protection for his books, he was told he would have to seek protection in each independent state. In large part, due to his campaigning, under the new American constitution passed in 1789, the Federal government was granted greater oversight over the states, which enabled it to pass the first Federal copyright act one year later.

Webster continued to work for better copyright legislation for the rest of his life. His efforts were rewarded in the 1830-1831 congressional session … [when] the new law granted protection of the author or his heirs for 28 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years. (source)

This new law remained in effect until 1909, long after Webster’s death.

Unlike current copyright legislation, which tends to be driven by big industry and is often enacted against the individual, Webster’s vision of copyright was one that protected artists against the publishing industry, which sought to profit off their work without compensating them. Webster’s law does not address or consider punishing individuals who seek to share and use intellectual property for non-profit purposes. As one source notes, Webster “might with more justice be termed the “father of royalties,” as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.” (source)

I wonder how Webster would feel about the various copyright battles being fought around the world today?

Image Credit: Noah Webster engraving via Wikipedia Commons

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Hard Men/Soft Deaths – Wyatt Earp

By Amy Thibodeau, May 8, 2010, 11:59 pm in Culture, History, Past

Despite the expression “what comes around, goes around” there are a group of outlaws who had surprisingly soft endings, despite having lived extremely hard, dangerous and, in most cases, crime ridden lives.

During his eighty years of life, Wyatt Earp earned the reputation as one of the most fearsome cowboys in the West. Fluctuating between legitimate lawmaker and criminal, Earp’s claim to fame is his participation in the famous gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona and his ongoing series of vendettas, most notably the Earp Vendetta, also referred to as the Arizona war. At various points in his career, Earp also worked as a “farmer, teamster, buffalo hunter, gambler, saloon-keeper, minder and boxing referee.” (source)

There are conflicting records of how many people Earp killed during his wild old days, but there are some records that place the number somewhere between eight and over thirty (source):

  • Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 1900: “Wyatt Earp is credited with ten men, one of them his own brother-in-law.”
  • G. W. Caldwell in the introduction to his interview with Wyatt, 1888: “[Wyatt Earp] Has killed more than a dozen stage robbers, murderers, and cattle thieves.”
  • Los Angeles Tribune, July 1888: “[Wyatt] Earp has a cemetery which he has stocked with over 30 men, and no one seemed desirous of questioning his word.”

Despite his life of debauchery, Earp had a rather peaceful death in Hollywood where, at the age of 80, he died at home of prostate cancer (though the actual cause of death isn’t confirmed) with his common law wife at his side. He had a proper funeral with Hollywood Western actors serving as his pallbearers and was cremated and buried in California. When his wife Josie died nearly twenty years later, she was also cremated, her ashes buried next to those of Wyatt Earp. He never returned to Arizona after the battle at the OK Corral.

Image Credit: Richard Beal’s Blog

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Flowchart: In-Person or Online? Which Communication Method To Use

By Dan Zambonini, May 5, 2010, 12:01 am in Business, Culture, Present

Flowchart: In-Person or Online? How Should You Communicate?

Click the image above for the full-size flowchart. This is a draft attempt to document the best communication method/channel for various situations (face to face, email, phone, instant messenger/skype, or conference call). Please add your thoughts and suggestions to this post, and we’ll update the flow chart accordingly.

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