Research Blog : statistics

What are the odds?

googler@evpl — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:15:00 GMT

Ever wonder what the odds are that an adult planning a Halloween costume will be a cat? How about the odds of being killed by a shark? There's a new website, The Book of Odds, that does just that — it gives you odds.

You can do a simple keyword search, an odds search (finding anything that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring by entering the number 100), or click on "advanced search" to look for additional content (articles and blog posts). Searching all content can be pretty interesting, particularly if you're looking to spice up a speech or a research paper, but there's not a huge amount of that kind of content.

The data comes from a lot of demographic studies, much of it market-based or governmental, and because of that, you tend to see age, gender, income, and location breakdowns that many people won't find that useful and tend to pad the result list.. (They're not consistent breakdowns though, so no comparison of shark attack odds between Indiana and Florida.)

If you see something in the result list that you want to know more about or want to use in some way, click on the odds for an item and you’ll get a visual representing those odds and a list of unrelated odds that are close or exactly the same as the one you’re looking at. The detail page also has a button marked "Sources & Definitions." Click it and you’ll get information on the source, rounding information, and even an appropriate way to cite the data presented. If you don't find odds for something you think should be there, click on "suggest odds" at the bottom of the page, and they may be able to research it and add it.

If you register and create an account (it’s free) you can start your own book of odds, which allows you to track odds, send odds information to a friend, mark those that you like or those that apply to you, etc. Worth a visit! Oh, and before you leave the Book of Odds site be sure to visit the "About Us" page. I got a chuckle out of this : "Book of Odds is not a search-engine, decision-engine, knowledge-engine, or any other kind of engine…so please don’t compare us to Google(tm). We did consider the term 'probability engine' for about 25 seconds, before coming to our senses."

Small business resources, free and online

googler@evpl — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:12:00 GMT

Indiana BizCafe is a free service that matches entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and others with business opportunities. Much like a social network, a user's matches are based on a self-created profile. The system continues to find matches as the database grows.

Stats Indiana is a comprehensive database of statistical demographics for the state of Indiana and is a useful resource for studying potential markets for your business.

Indiana Economic Development Corporation oversees Indiana’s statewide business attraction and development efforts, coordinates state programs and incentives for companies looking to grow in Indiana, and provides technical assistance, business expertise and funding to Indiana entrepreneurs and high-tech start-ups.

INDURE (the Indiana Database of Research of University Expertise) was created by the State of Indiana to help transform university-developed technology into money-making businesses. The site is an online searchable database of Indiana researchers, intellectual property and on-going sponsored research projects available for further development or for integration into new products or services.

SCORE (the Service Corps of Retired Executives) provides general business advice to existing small business on everything from how to write a business plan, to cash flow management, to developing a marketing plan. The phone number of the Evansville office is 426-6144.

Small Business Development Center - The small business development corporation offers useful tools and information for businesses operating in Indiana. The phone number for Evansville's office is 425-7232.

SmallBizU features 24 free online courses that teach entrepreneurs the three Ms: money, management, and marketing.

Nielson Media Research blog

googler@evpl — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:33:00 GMT

Nielson, the ratings company, has recently launched a pretty interesting blog. In addition to expected posts about television viewership (over 211 million viewers watched the Olympics, a new record), they also provide an interesting quantitative perspective on other current happenings ("Obama's text message reaches 2.9 million").

Neighborhood population statistics

googler@evpl — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:53:00 GMT

I had an interesting question a few weeks ago, about the population of Howell. The question is not as simple as it seems. First, Howell isn't incorporated (which is determined by checking both the census and the US Board on Geographic Names Information System). But not being an incorporated place doesn't in itself mean there are no population statistics for any particular geographic area. The census does population totals for areas like zip codes and precincts.

What it really comes down to is determining the boundaries of the Howell neighborhood, and then seeing if any of the geographic entities with population counts coincide with those boundaries.

So step one was consulting with the local history librarian, Sharon Olson, for hints in figuring out the neighborhood boundaries. She went straight to the website of an organization called United Neighborhoods of Evansville. The menu on the left of that page includes "member neighborhoods." There are a lot listed (check it out) and one of them is Howell. Voila, a map.

Next is figuring out if there are population figures for an area that coincides with the Howell neighborhood. Finding population data is always a bit of an adventure, although the Census Bureaus "American FactFinder" interface makes it easier than it might be. I decided to see if I could Google up a cheat sheet that would reassure me I was doing it right.

Whenever I look for tutorials, helpful hints on researching, etc., I always restrict my Google search to site:.edu. (This means that my results will exclusively be colleges and university websites -- usually, of course, their libraries.) After a minute of experimentation, my search was [neighborhoods "american factfinder" site:edu]. (I was still trying to make sure that the Census Bureau didn't use locally-defined neighborhoods as a geographic entity.)

What you'll see in that result list are some excellent examples of the type of help you can get from other libraries, just by using guides they've published online. Using the first one, I determined via American Factfinder that census tracts are the closest geographic entities to what a resident would call a neighborhood. (Actually, the "traffic analysis zone" came even closer -- a geographic entity I'd never heard of before -- but it doesn't have population totals.) The boundaries of the tract, however, aren't the boundaries of the neighborhood.

There are smaller geographic entities -- blocks (and block groups). The fun part was figuring out that I had to go into American FactFinder a different way to get the population totals by block (with the help of yet another group of cheat sheets Google found for me, after using Google to figure out I needed "detailed tables," not "quick tables").

Actually, I'd forgotten how complicated this question was. I probably shouldn't write blog posts about boring stuff like this, should I.

Never mind.

(Did anybody even make it to the end of the post? Heh.)

LOC business webliography (and finding it again)

googler@evpl — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:31:00 GMT

One of the content feeds I've subscribed to is the Resource Shelf, which describes itself as "a daily newsletter with resources of interest to information professionals, educators and journalists." A recent entry (I'm a little behind -- it's from July 14) looked at what editor Shirl Kennedy called "niche statistics" and contains a diverse array of really specialized statistical sources on the web.

The link that really caught my eye was to wedding industry research, from Library of Congress Business Reference Services. Not the first part, the second -- the LOC's Business Reference Services, which I hadn't been aware of. Clicking the link and looking around a bit got me to the main page for their Business Reference Services, and from there to their list of internet resources. Thinking it looked pretty cool (and noticing it has a section for marketing research, something I'm always on the lookout for), I started wondering how I would find it again.

I not a big fan of bookmarking. I also don't like accumulating links via Del.icio.us particularly, either, although I make use of the hive mind there to find stuff sometimes. I prefer figuring out the search that's going to get me to the site again. (Yeah, this backfires sometimes.) I generally assume that I'm going to forget the actual name of the page but remember something about its location -- in this case, I might remember it's at LOC. So in Google, the search to find it again will be ["marketing research" site:loc.gov]. Or just ["marketing research" site:.gov] because this search (and I always test the search) puts the site I want on the first page of results, and also adds some other interesting stuff.

Fun, huh? I just wish I could calculate the odds of ever needing to find the site again -- or of succeeding when I try.