There's a lot of useful information to be gleaned, here. For example: 65+ people watch a lot of TV.
People with advanced degrees are slow eaters.
You people with two children sure appear to work a lot.
Under Personal Care, apparently Americans spend an average of 54 seconds on "personal or private activities," like having sex.
9 comments:
That is super cool.
When the data itself implies that a certain group of people, by their own account, watch more TV and work less than another group of people, am I racist for noticing?
Litcube, Canadians are perfectly decent people. They can't help it if they have to work less or have better tv.
I really wish they hadn't lumped having sex in with brushing your teeth. I mean, that's really useless.
I might be serious about this. I am not sure yet, though.
ICBC is an insurance company in B.C. here, and there was data collected in regards to how many accidents happened, how many were fraudulent, what time of day, alcohol involved, etc. Several of the columns identified the race of the individual. Some of it was leaked, and certain obvious conclusions were made that weren't very polite. The data was trashed, and all records stricken, etc, even though the verisimilitude of the data was sound.
I think this data might be a racist, and I'm actually almost being serious. I don't mean maliciously racist, but racist nonetheless. What importance is it what race the dude is? What would you plan to do with that data?
Dunno, but to me the distinction of race is pretty vague. Maybe a point to make is that the data isn't so much racist, as culturalist. I mean that's the real point, isn't it? Certain cultures value different qualities more than others, and this is just true regardless of race.
Look at Panic. He's a huge racist against his own race, and as such has decided to switch cultures to that of the Furries. Anyone can be a furry!
Not to discount the will to succeed, which sure can overcome a lot of things, but on a very macro scale, I think it's difficult (and kind of uncool) to ignore certain cultural bottlenecks (such as nation-wide institutionalized enslavement).
I think there are a lot of ways to look at this. It might be important that everyone in this survey is self-identifying. There's also something odd about the way the data is presented. If you spend some time clicking through this fun interactive graph, you begin to notice that not much changes, for the most part. There are obvious stand-outs: People over 65 watch a lot of TV, and unemployed people don't work much, but the data really starts to jump around when it comes to those identifying themselves as Black.
I really don't know what to make of that.
Another one:
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager
Sad to see the occupation of "huckster" to dwindle to almost nothing by the year 2000.
Post a Comment