Feces, faeces, ordure, dung, manure, excreta, stool, stool-NOT-faeces, and stool-NOT-feces are the prime examples in a newly published study that examines the need for data-driven standards. The study is: “Laying a Community-Based Foundation for Data-Driven Semantic Standards in Environmental Health Sciences,” Carolyn J. Mattingly, Rebecca Boyles, Cindy P. Lawler, Astrid C. Haugen, Allen Dearry, and Melissa Haendel, Environmental […]
Tag: data
Quantifying the Smell of Urban Areas
Data analysis has led to numerous insights into a diverse variety of complex systems. A new paper that gives a whiff of such insights is The Emotional and Chromatic Layers of Urban Smells by Daniele Quercia of Bell Labs, Luca Maria Aiello of Yahoo Labs, and Rossano Schifanella of University of Turin. Quercia et al. write the […]
When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
“Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences.” – inform professor Anne S. Hsu and colleagues Andy Horng, Thomas L. Griffiths and Nick Chater in a new paper for the journal Cognitive Science. “We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is […]
Algorithmic Distinguishing of Novelists from their Punctuation Patterns
Adam J. Calhoun has written a wonderful blog entry that illustrates, with some great data visualization, that it is possible to algorithmically distinguish different novelists based only on their punctuation habits. The idea is simple: just remove all words from a corpus of text and look at the patterns of the punctuation. Here is an illustration. […]