Bayesian Empire

See What's Hot on Wikipedia in over 13,000 categories!

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:03:47 -0500

All you stat lovers out there, check out our new site, The Full Wiki. It allows you to monitor global trends by seeing what's hot on Wikipedia. We've combined Wikipedia traffic data with their categories, to create 13,000 what's hot lists. Updated daily.

Some interesting examples from today's trending topics:

Top emotions: anxiety, schadenfreude, nostalgia. See all 58
Hottest films: Toy Story 3, The Last Airbender, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. See all 564
Most notorious American serial killers: Ted Bundy, Jeffry Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy. See all 211

Find out what countries spike the world's interest in all kinds of areas like prostitution and racism.
Or check out other hot lists like top internet memes, top hoaxes in the US and biggest mysteries.

The Full Wiki marries Wikipedia and Google Maps.

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 02:58:39 -0600

Our new site, The Full Wiki has brought together Google Maps and Wikipedia. Now you can view any article on Wikipedia with all the locations mentioned on a Google Map.

You can see at a glance where most of the activity in the Renaissance happened, namely Europe and primarily in Italy. Where are the world's tornados? Or volcanos? Heat waves? Nuclear power plants?

The map and the article are linked throughout. Click on a map marker and it jumps to that part of the article. Click on an article marker and it will show you that location on the map.

See for example our tourism fact map. If we click on Bangkok (Q), for example, we can see the relevant part of the article and learn that it's the third most visited city in the world. Or zooming into Europe and clicking on Nice, Wikipedia tells us it was one of the first and best established resorts in the French Riveria.

Some more examples:

See what happened all around the world in 1945.
See where the drug trade is carried out.
Barack Obama has the most international background of any recent US president. See it mapped.

Proposal for a probabilistic grammar checker using Wikipedia's revision history.

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:48:21 -0500

Everyone hates Microsoft Word's grammar checker, yet no one tries to replace it.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were several grammar checkers. Then in 1992, Microsoft added grammar checking to Word. The rest is history. Microsoft dominated the market and innovation stopped.

AbiWord, a competitor to MSWord, now uses an open source package, Links Grammar, to do grammar checking. But as I understand it, Links Grammar is a rule based checker. In the text processing field these days though, higher quality results come from throwing a large amount of data at the problem and using statistically-based algorithms to mine it.

This is what Google does. Their Google Sets service extracts lists from the web and does association rules on them - similar to Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought these books". Google has a patent on this. Google translate and other commercial machine translators learn by comparing large volumes of human-translated texts. These are more effective than attempts to codify all the rules of a language.

So why not use the same approach for grammar checking? There's a lot more data out there to use than back in 1992. But what data source to use? I propose: the Wikipedia revision history. There's about 3 terabytes of text publically available. A large proportion of it is simply minor grammatical corrections. I believe this would be the largest publically available source of grammar corrections in the world. There is something in the order of 300 million revisions on the history. And if only a third are corrections of grammatical mistakes, that's 100 million corrections to learn from.

How would it work? I'm not sure exactly but I have some ideas. Look for minor changes in between revisions. Some are even tagged as grammatical changes:

Consider subsequent edits to revisions to be higher quality than the previous. Editors are less likely to change correct grammar into incorrect grammar.
Consider revisions that last a long time to be higher quality than ones that disappear quickly. Vandalism is generally wiped quickly.
Use a part of speech tagger to help disambiguate word usage.
Generate transformations using both the actual words and their morphology. It wouldn't take long to discover that "PLURALWORD is" is replaced with "PLURALWORD are".
Part of speech tagging and parse trees could also be used.

I attempted this back in 2006 but I've decided it would be best as an open source project. I should dig into my code archives and see what I can find.

What this project needs:

Big time server resources, beyond what my project TheFullWiki can provide. I understand many universities have already created servers to store Wikipedia revisions and analyse them. Access to this would be very helpful.
Computational linguists
A more recent dump of Wikipedia revision history would be nice.
Pointers to any similar attempts?

Announcing TheFullWiki

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:10:13 -0500

From the makers of NationMaster comes a new project aimed at harnessing the wealth of content of wikis.

It's called the The Full Wiki. Its goal is to become a platform for an enriched user experience for wikis using open licenses.

We have seen many fantastic projects come and go under the weight of traffic spikes, large datasets and the need to stay fresh. We want to provide serious hosting resources to make these projects feasible.

If you have a wiki oriented project you'd like us to host or provide other help, check out The Full Wiki.

Feature update

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:01:23 -0500

We've been working away for the past month and are pleased to announce a raft of new little features:

Refined moderation of user comments. Your valued contributions will appear on the site quicker.
Top rankings pages now show the top 5 most popular stats for each variable, rather than the top 1.
We've put a search box at the bottom of each page, so it's convenient to find new things out of our vast collection.
The encyclopedia home page has been cleaned up, showing categories and themes.
Best of all: you can now sort by amount and alphabetical order on graph pages with instant feedback. No need to wait for the page to reload

We hope these modifications improve your experience. Feel free to drop us a line with any thoughts of your own.

CIA update and time series data

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:12:16 -0600

We have just updated our CIA World Factbook stats, making use of the December 18 version.

But at NationMaster, we don't just use the latest Factbook, but all the other ones going back to 2003. So you can compare time series information with ease, for example, graph the growth of the Chinese internet users.

December update

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:45:33 -0600

Today I'm pleased announce a sizable update!

This time it's a mix of updates and entirely new stats. We now have population figures updated for 2008.

We have a raft of updated media stats: we have radios, TV's, newspapers. Did you know that Chinese newspapers have a circulation of 76 million? Or that Amenia has a cinema seat for every 20 people?

And new to NationMaster, books broken down by genre. See who's producing the most titles in areas such as religion, literature, arts and science.

Our tourism stats are getting comprehensive too. We can now tell you the destinations favoured by Africans, Southern Asians or Europeans.

Keep checking back. We have a lot more in the works over the next month.

Hiring: Editor

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:08:32 -0500

We are still hiring for an editor for NationMaster. Please drop us a line if you think you're suitable.

Hiring: Full time web developer

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:41:06 -0500

Due to ongoing growth, we are now hiring for full time web developers. If you'd like to work on NationMaster and other free research sites, we would love to hear from you.

Ad Sales / Ad Operations role

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:48:44 -0500

Due to recent growth, we are currently hiring for an ad operations and ad sales role. If you know online advertising from a technical and business point of view, this may be the role for you.

NationMaster and FactBites top Web 2.0 apps

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:36:44 -0500

We are honoured to be listed among Australia's best web 2.0 applications this week. Ross Dawson produced a list for the prestigious Business Review Weekly showing our most internationally successful, innovative sites.

Two of our sites, FactBites and NationMaster, made the grade.

Geoff Evason put together a list ranking according to Quantcast traffic data alone. The list seems to have disappeared though, so I've reproduced it myself:

1. 1134 retailmenot.com
2. 6423 bugmenot.com
3. 18686 nationmaster.com
4. 41362 uvouch.com
5. 48887 minti.com
6. 53051 redbubble.com
7. 74603 atlassian.com
8. 76818 mebeam.com
9. 87651 spyk.com
10. 129624 swapace.com
11. 148185 blocklayer.com
12. 165573 fwditon.com
13. 195584 inthemix.com.au
14. 199477 globalsurfari.com
15. 203200 pikistrips.com
16. 222399 rememberthemilk.com
17. 280084 rocketreader.com
18. 332987 factbites.com
19. 426879 mig33.com
20. 522232 blogarate.com

THe middle column is rank according to Feb08 Quantcast data. This puts us in 3rd and 18th places. No matter how you cut it, Rapid Intelligence is one of Australia's top independent publishers.

Vastly improved internal search

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:53:44 -0500

Our undying mission is to make our stats as accessible as possible, no easy task when there's over 8000 of them.

So that's why we've recently been paying a lot of attention to search. We've just unveiled an update that finds what you're after, more quickly and more accurately than ever before.

It might look the same but inside it's much smarter. Give it a go! Top center of every page.

Feedback always welcome.

Luke.

Forums are back, better navigation

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:52:20 -0600

Our forums are now back online. Apologies to our regular users for both the initial deluge and the resulting downtime. And to new users, we again have a place for discussing global issues and asking the advice of your fellow NMers.

Also, we're recognising that as the site grows, it's getting harder to get to your stats. So we've been making some changes. Some of these have already gone live like showing the top 20 stats in categories. That's the default but we're not walking away from our mission of being the one-stop shop for stats. By clicking the "All" tab you can still get the full list.

Luke.

Time Series Data and Major Update

nospam@example.com (Luke Metcalfe) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 02:09:42 -0600

After much hard work, we can announce one of our biggest ever new features; literally a whole new dimension for NationMaster.

Now you can walk back in time.

Here's how it works. Take a newly updated stat like number of telephone subscribers.

1. Select a year from the drop down box and the variable for that year. This shows all countries for the given year.

2. Click on the "..." to the right of the date for a particular country name. This brings up the country's value for the stat over time eg look at the growth in telephone subscribers over time in China. Or check out the growth in personal computers in the United States.

This is only available for newly added stats but there's certainly a lot of them to digest. We hope you like them.

Finance your Summer Cruise

nospam@example.com (Paul Selibio) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:23:30 -0500

If you think going on a cruise this summer is expensive, think again—the cruise industry now caters to low income passengers in order that they can offer an affordable vacation for more people.

Nowadays, Cruises are very easy on your budget, because it is all-inclusive. Meaning, one price includes transportation, meals, lodging, various shipboard activities, live entertainment, kids' programs, and so much more.

So this summer, never let this opportunity pass you by. Create priceless memories your children will look back to. If you can not afford a cruise, or if you need extra money, you cab always avail of a payday loan anytime, anywhere! Payday loans are short-term loans without requiring a credit check so even those with bad credit or no credit rating can apply. You can get as much as $1,500 payday loan amount which very sufficient to spend on your summer cruise vacation. What is great about payday loans is that you can apply for a payday loan online and payday loan providers can deposit your payday loan money straight to your bank account in less than hour.

So now that you know where to get funding for your summer cruise vacation, here are tips which can save you money:

Determine what you want in your Cruise vacation

There are cruise passengers that regard the liner as their resort destination and they just want to indulge themselves in the liner’s amenities and activities and do not care much where the liner would take them. Others however, go on a cruise mainly to see and enjoy other places. Know what is most important to you so that you can select a liner that will cater to your needs.

Picking a cruise ship, deciding on your itinerary

While many cruise liners have enticing brochures with photos that you can get from travel agencies, going online so that you can check out everything including pricing and cruise itinerary is the best way to be well informed. Most cruise liners will entertain your questions by email, so it helps to ask as many questions so that before deciding, you are sure that the cruise liner best suits your requirements.

Book with the help of your travel agent

Booking with a travel agent is not expensive; on the contrary travel agents are well informed about special promotions and special package rates where to what most people are aware of.

Select a Cruise ship that will sail from a ship pot near your area

Choosing a port near where you live can save you thousands.

Air transportation

Of course, if you will book your flight separately, you will save a lot. However, this also comes with a price – you are, as they say, on your own. While if you book with the cruise liner, the cruise liner assumes accountability – that for whatever reason your flight is cancelled or delayed and you missed the ship’s departure, the cruise liner most often will have you fly to their next port so you can catch up.

Payday loans are increasing in popularity today because it can cater to almost all your financial needs, including having that summer vacation of your dreams and making priceless memories with your family that no amount of money can buy.

A summer suggestion

FinanceRecords.org

Content Source: FindMyPaydayLoan.com