We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26M pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the 1B mark. Over the last 8 years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion unique URLs on the web at once!
Tag: statistics
Rule by Decree
I was somewhat surprised by these results. I’d kind of assumed that with the growing concentration of political power in Washington, and the expansion of the authority of executive departments into all sectors of American life, that executive orders would grow apace, but this is not actually the case. Measured by executive orders per year, America’s Great Dictator was none other than Teddy Roosevelt, who cranked out an average of 356 every year he spent in the White House. Presidents Coolidge and Hoover: often stereotyped as laissez-faire hands-off executives, averaged 225 and 242 executive orders per year, not far behind FDR’s 274. Eisenhower issued only 60 per year, and no president since has issued as many as 80 per year.
who knew. dubya is not the most authoritative president
Union Strike Analysis
strikes are going away.
Evidence Based Scheduling
You gather evidence, mostly from historical timesheet data, that you feed back into your schedules. What you get is not just one ship date: you get a confidence distribution curve, showing the probability that you will ship on any given date.
that sounds reasonably sane
Near-Death TV
More US TV watchers are getting older, a condition that gives them more overall time for watching TV
with tv being such a braindead, near death experience, no wonder geriatrics flock to it.
Bloom Filter Calculator
given desired values of either size or probability of false positives, gives appropriate bloom filter parameters
Fooled by Randomness
Taleb is writing about truths that most people don’t really want to know. They want to think they know, and they want to act like they know, but deep down they don’t want to think all the way through to the logical conclusion.
Burger threat
yay for statistical literacy
gregorrothfuss on Ohloh
neat! calculates my experience with various languages based on commits
Numeracy
H.G. Wells predicted that “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 