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MatheMUSEments
A
Good Plot
By Ivars Peterson
Muse, November/December 2005, p. 22.
These days, a lot of people recognize the name Harry
Potter, the hero of J.K. Rowling's immensely popular books. But Harry
isn't a very popular baby name. In the United States in 2004, it ranked
only 531st among names for boys. It was much more popular about 100
years ago, when it ranked in the top 15.
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The popularity
of the name Harry has fallen since its peak more than 100
years ago. © babywizard.com |
This information comes from a fun Web site that's
designed to help parents pick names for their offspring. One of its
features is a special program that lets you zoom in on particular
names and track their popularity over the years (see www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/).
The opening screen shows nearly 5,000 names, each
represented by a colored stripe (blue for boys' names, pink for girls'
names). A stripe's width shows how popular the name was. Moving the
cursor to any point in the display highlights a name and reveals its
rank during a given decade. For example, you can quickly find out
that Mary was the most popular girl's name in every decade from 1880
to 1960. In 2004, the top girl's name was Emily. In the 1960s, Emily
was ranked 251.
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The spooky
thing about first names is that they often tell you a person's
age. Chances are that a Susan (above) is 50, but a Madison
(below) is probably much younger. © babywizard.com |
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© babywizard.com |
This display was designed by Laura Wattenberg, who
has written a book about picking baby names. She had help from her
husband, Martin Wattenberg, who works for IBM developing ways of displaying
data that go way beyond graphs and pie charts.
In one recent project, Wattenberg and his coworkers
analyzed how people have put together an encyclopedia known as Wikipedia
(www.wikipedia.org). This online encyclopedia is being written by
people from all over the world. Using colors to represent authors,
the researchers produced large displays that showed when text was
added to Wikipedia articles.
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The history logs for articles from
the online encyclopedia Wikipedia can be very revealing. Each color
in a log corresponds to a writer. The vertical lines mark different
versions of the article. Black gaps in the log indicate text was deleted
or vandalized. There are quite a few gaps in the log for the article
on evolution. © IBM Research |
Sometimes authors politely add to what is already
there. Other times, they irritably delete what others said and substitute
their own version. The article on the Microsoft company is full of
gray or white anonymous contributions, but the one on IBM is mostly
by authors willing to be identified. And many pages have been vandalized
at some point in their history by visitors who came in and deleted
text or wrote something rude, damage that shows up as a black gap
in the record.
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The history log
for the article on the Microsoft company is mostly
gray and white, colors that indicate the writers
wanted to remain anonymous. © IBM Research |
Whether you're interested in the popularity of names
or how an encyclopedia is put together, the right sort of display
can make your search for information that much more revealing—and
fun.
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