Human Interaction with Technology and Information

Collin’s Movie Monologue page

What is this data?

1. “Collin’s Movie Monologue page” has hundreds of monologues all from films and hit television series. Created in 2006, by Colin L. Ryono it displays an alphabetized list of films and the monologues from them in an easily accessible page.

W Why is it interesting?

2. .It is especially interesting to me because I am an actress (and is to all actors/actresses) because there are so many times when you need a monologue fast, and on this site it is very easy to find. However, this site is interesting and useful to the average person as well, because allot of times in movies, you can misunderstand something or want to repeat it and with this site you can look it up.

How do you obtain the information?

To enter this website just enter http://www.whysanity.net/monos/ in your address toolbar. If you run into trouble with this however, “Colins Movie Monolougue page” is the first link on the google results page if you go to google search and type in “movie monologues”. Once in the site it is easy to find/select the monologue of your choice from the alphabetized list of movies A-Z and clicking on which one you want to get a monologue from. You then click on the specific monologue you’d like to read or print out and you are set to go.

It What questions does it answer? It

an It answers what monologues are from what movie, and gives a word to word account of the monologues.

Description of the Data
My proposal is to compile and compare statistics released by independent publications and services to more traditional and controlled publications and mediums.
I would compare Last.fm’s global charts to those released by Billboard magazine over the course of a one month period to track artists’ weekly rankings in both publications. Because the music industry has changed so dramatically over the past few years, I would also be interested in comparing the iTunes Store statistics of artists sales during the said time period.

How we can obtain the data:

All of this data is readily accessible on existing data statistics. A sample Excel file for doing this is here: music.xls.

http://www.last.fm/music/+charts/track/

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/charts/chart_display.jsp?g=Singles&f=The+Billboard+Hot+100
http://www.apple.com/euro/itunes/charts/top10songs.html
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/best_new_music

Why this data is interesting:
Tracking five artists, to be selected once the data has been compiled and compared, would provide insight into the listening habits of a wide scope of individuals. Last.fm users, iTunes users, and Billboard charts would provide a spectrum of insight into music trends and the way the nation absorbs the enormous amount of information/music available to the public through radio and internet.

I would then take the rankings and statistics of said 5 artists, determine their sales stats on iTunes.

What specific questions can the data answer:

Who is listening to what?
Where are they listening?
What does the data reveal about listener trends in technology savy users compared to traditional radio spin statistic? What about iTunes downloads? What do independent music reviews have to say about particular artists and does this have any effect on the success of particular artists?

It would be interesting to then investigate the Last.fm user demographics for top listeners of the 5 particular artists and determine who is listening to what, and where in the country. To focus the scope of the project I will focus on US based membership only. The main user info that will be collected for the project is gender, age, and location of users. Once the project evolves into a more focused set of data, it would be interesting to use all of the different statistic information available through Last.fm in regards to top listener rankings for the said artists.

A little background information about Last.fm is included below… [all info taken from wikipedia]

Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It is the world’s largest social music platform with over 20 million active users based in more than 232 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m (US$280m), making Last.fm the largest European Web 2.0 purchase to date.
Using a unique music recommendation system known as “Audioscrobbler”, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user’s computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (”Scrobbled”) via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.
Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library, but are not able to listen to individual tracks on demand, or to download tracks unless the rightsholder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations.

Global charts
Last.fm generates weekly “global” charts of the top 400 artists and tracks listened to by all Last.fm users. To prevent the artificial boosting of an artist or song by deliberately repeated tracks from a single listener, these charts are based on the total number of individual listeners (the reach) and not the number of actual plays.

The result is notably different from traditional commercial music charts provided by the UK Top 40, Billboard magazine, Soundscan and others, which are based on radio plays or sales. Last.fm charts are less volatile and a new album’s release may be reflected in play data for many months or years after it drops out of commercial charts. For example, The Beatles have consistently been a top 5 band at Last.fm, reflecting the continued popularity of the band’s music irrespective of current album sales. In addition the Last.fm charts are much more rock, indie and alternative influenced and less pop-influenced than regular charts.
The main reason behind the differences is that the charts reflect the musical taste of the particular demographic of the service’s users, not that of the general public. Last.fm users generally have an Internet connection, may be more computer-literate than average, and may have wide collections of music from which to choose, due to the ability to download MP3 files from the internet.
The Global Tag Chart shows the 100 most popular tags that have been used to describe artists, albums, and tracks. This is based on the total number of times the tag has been applied by last.fm users since the tagging system was first introduced and does not necessarily reflect the number of users currently listening to any of the related “global tag radio” stations.
For the week ending October 14th 2007, Radiohead broke the last.fm record for both weekly plays and weekly listeners following the release of In Rainbows. Track 15 Step set records for weekly plays and listeners and the ten tracks from In Rainbows made up the weekly top 10, with the lowest charting In Rainbows song having almost three times the number of listeners of the next highest placed track (Stronger by Kanye West, which had itself set a record for number of listeners a few weeks previously). The Radiohead album held the top 10 spots for the four weeks after its release.

The data I would like to analyze comes from multiple sources. All professional athletes would be added to a database. The leagues they participate in will be noted along with their names. A list of all drug or behavior related league suspensions shall be cross referenced with the name list. Public arrest records will be cross referenced with the names of professional athletes as well.

            The data is interesting because Athletes are role models to many children in America; however some do things unsuitable for a role model.

            The data would come from professional sports leagues and organizations such as the NBA, NFL, MLB, or UFC among others. Data would also be collected from public arrest records from local, state, and the federal government. 

            The data collected would answer the following questions:

·         Have there been more instances of doping or arrests over time?

·         Which professional sports league has the most players committing crimes?

·         Are players in any city more likely to commit a crime?

·         Are players on a particular team more likely to commit a crime?

·         Are players graduating from certain colleges more likely to commit a crime?

·         Which crimes committed by athletes are the most common?

Description of the data: 

Ebay is an online company that allows users to sell products to customers by auctioning them, and to buy them from other users with the same method. With 35 categories including antiques, books, electronics, jewelry, music, tickets, sports memorabilia, and home & garden, and hundreds of sub-categories, the site attempts to cater to every audience. To buy or sell on the site, you must create a user name. Ebay then allows you to buy and sell, storing your 30 day bid history.  Most users both buy and sell.  Anyone selling an item must put their location with the information about the product for shipping reasons. I think it would be interesting to see what individual users are buying, as well as what other items they look for and bid on in the 30 day period.  It would also be interesting to find out what kinds of people are buying and selling from what areas of the world. 

Why is the data interesting?

Buying items, if not selling them, is a major part of a person’s everyday life.  We purchase the things we need, like food and clothes, but also the things we like. Consequently, the things we buy speak to other people about the kind of person we are. Ebay is even more interesting because it puts all of the available items in one easy-to-use interface and it allows for people to buy items from anywhere- from work, home, school, etc. It is also possible to find out where a seller is living.

How can we obtain this data?

When you click on an item that is being auctioned, you are brought to a screen where you can see the number of bids and the high bidder. You can then click on the high bidder, and can view their bidding history.   For example, this user’s profile shows:

The information about what people are searching and bidding on can be found by searching through the profiles of individual users.

In order to get information about where people who were selling certain items lived, someone would have to go through the items of interest that were currently being auctioned and look at the seller’s profile.

What specific questions can the data answer?

Who is buying what and how often?

What else are the people buying a certain item buying?

If there are any trends with regard to location and the types of items being purchased.

Description of the Data

The purpose of the data set will be to list the cars currently made that have the highest mile per gallon ratings. The data set will also contain baseline cost for each model and advertised MPG vs. actual MPG.

Why the Data is Interesting

The data is interesting because modern day society is highly dependent upon transportation.  With gas prices at over $3 per gallon, saving money on the daily need of transportation is something everyone would be interested in.

How do we Obtain the Data

We can obtain all the baseline prices and advertised mpg information from the company websites and/or dealerships. The only way to find the actual MPG would be to take a brand new model of each car to an indoor race track, fill it with an exact known amount of gas (3 gallons should be enough to get an accurate reading) and drive it until it stops. Each car would have to be driven in the same fashion as far as acceleration to testing speed, final cruising speed, and rpm management. For accuracy you could repeat this test one or two times for each car. This would give you a general “highway” MPG. If you wanted a city MPG you could do the same thing, but have repeated scheduled stops to represent traffic and traffic lights.

What Specific Questions Will the Data Answer

a)  Which makes and models get the most miles per gallon (both city and highway)?

b) Which companies are being honest about their advertised MPG rating?

c)  Is the cost of buying expensive Hybrid technology worth the money you save in gas?

Mike Beideman & Emily Capkanis

The Target Audience of the Most Popular Websites

• Description of the data

The internet is a very popular tool especially for youth in our nation.  People use it for shopping, entertainment, and research.  There is a lot of potential for advertising on the sites as well as search results. 

• Why the data is interesting

Websites operators want to know how to improve the user interfaces of their sites.  Knowing the greatest number of users could help to improve content as well as advertising.  Advertisers and website operators can improve business based on this data.

• How we can obtain the data

The first step is to identify the most popular domains on the web.  This can be easily achieved by looking at already gathered data regarding popularity of websites. http://seekingalpha.com/article/25309-the-20-most-popular-websites

http://blog.compete.com/2007/10/30/top-50-websites-domains-digg-youtube-flickr-facebook/

The next step is to analyze the audience for each of these top sites and note specific information such as age, location, and possibly other interests.  http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2006/10/06/tech-myspace.html - this link contains data regarding the ages of myspace.com users.  This information is useful in determining the audience for the site.  Information regarding the users of other sites may be found using simple searches; however, additional surveys of users may be needed to find all of the data we’re looking for.

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• What specific questions the data will/can answer?
  • Which websites are preferred under the age of 18?
  • Which websites have a fan base of 21+ (advertising for alcohol)
  • What region are users from? (for local advertising)
  • Do the actual users match with the sites intended target audience

1. Description of the data:

- TicketMaster (www.ticketmaster.com)

- A nation-wide ticketing agency where you can purchase tickets to see artists, teams, other venues and more. They also have more operations around the world in specific other countries.

2. Why the data is interesting:

- Americans love to go to concerts and sporting events and that is why ticketmaster is so interesting because it gives you full access to information about events and venues that are important to Americans, and others worldwide also.

- Ticketmaster.com is also known for having descent ticket prices compared to what the actual event privately would charge or other ticketing sites.

- The data is also interesting because you can search an artist, for example, and see the different locations where they will be playing and once you select a location you can view a map of the seating to specifically pick certain seats that you know you will be happy with. Not all ticketing sites let you see the seating chart/map.

1. How we can obtain the data:

- The data can be obtained by going to ticketmaster.com. As soon as you retrieve the site, there is a box in the top left corner of the interface that allows you to search for an artist, team, band, or a specific event and more. Now you have easy access to where your favorite artists’ and more are performing!

- Overall, one can find and buy tickets at ticketmaster.com for the following: concerts, sports, arts, comedians, theater, theatre, broadway shows and family events.

- Here is an example: I went to the site typed “dave matthews band” in the search box. It gave me 3 results, for example, one was “Izod Center, East Rutherford, NJ, Dave Matthews Band - Tuesday 11/13/07 @ 7:00PM. So, now I know when one of my favorite bands is going to be playing next and it happens to be this month here in New Jersey. I am a pleased ticketmaster.com customer and the prices for the seats weren’t bad at all!

1. What specific questions the data will/can answer: The data can answer several of questions, here are some common ones I thought of:

- Is my favorite band playing in New Jersey this month?

- Can I sell tickets to other fans via ticketmaster.com?

- Does ticketmaster.com provide me with entertainment guides, such as museum guides or Broadway guides?

- Does ticketmaster.com offer sports packages?

- Can I create a personal account with ticketmaster?

- What do I do if I can’t attend the event I purchased tickets for? Are they returnable or can I sell them ahead of time or can I switch them with a different even of equal value?

- What’s the lowest ticket price for a Bon Jovi concert? Will the seats still be good even though the tickets are cheap? Is there a seating chart of the location I can look at?

Today’s office hour will be from 3:40pm-4:20pm. Sorry for the late notice.

Due to a department meeting at lunchtime today, today’s office hour will be rescheduled. I will be in my office from 10:15-10:45 and from 3:45-4:30.

Would this website be appropriate for determining what qualifies a shade of yellow? I also found one off of this other site.

//This was published using Microsoft Live Writer, I hope it publishes correctly.

-Blake Gideon

bgideon@drew.edu