Monday, March 9, 2009 |
08:09 - Anecdotality
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/02/27/books-and-music-that-make-you-dumb/?mod=yhoof
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Hey, it's good to see those crazy kids at my old alma mater are keeping themselves busy:
Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.
With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.
For example, the favorite musician of the smartest students was Beethoven, with an average SAT score of 1371. Also on the “smart” end of the scale were Sufjan Stevens (1260), Counting Crows (1247), and Radiohead (1220). And sadly for Lil Wayne, enjoying his music was associated with being the dumbest, with an average SAT score of 889.
Now that IP addresses are pretty easily pinpointed via publicly accessible location databases, there's no end to the pretty graphs one can create given a large and interesting enough pool of data with IPs attached.
Via JMH.
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