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May 2011

Google Correlate

Google Correlate is a new services from Google that allows you analyze temporal or spatial correlations between search terms. Could be incredibly interesting data in here for various fields. The methodology from the whitepaper gives an insight as to how Google does these correlations at scale:

In our Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) system, we achieve a good balance of precision and speed by using a two-pass hash-based system. In the first pass, we compute an...

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A search engine for figures

I got an email a few days ago urging me to try www.zanran.com, a search engine "for finding data and statistics". I'm skeptical of some of these search engines (I can never find anything I want on www.rseek.org for example), but I was pleasantly surprised. I typed in "fatwa" and, lo and behold, uncovered a few papers that are of some relevance to the project I'm doing on Islamic fatwas.

My first reaction is that this is really a search engine for finding figures and tables, not necessarily "data" or "...

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Can a single case be used to test theory?

Every so often, I try to take some time to read something that I should have read ages ago. Tonight's gem was the 2010 draft of "The Industrial Organization of Rebellion: The Logic of Forced Labor and Child Soldiering" by Bernd Beber and Chris Blattman (link). The paper gets a lot of traction out of a formal model and then matches these predictions up to reality using some unique and hard-earned data.

An off-hand comment in the paper caught my attention: Beber and Blattman's assertion that...

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