Understanding Information (sorting the signal from the noise)
One of these videos is propaganda and the other is information (and some entertainment). Both use statistics, but one draws scary conclusions and has a fundamental flaw in its ‘reasoning’. The other talks about how and why things change and new tools to help us understand statistics and spot fundamental trends.
propaganda
shorter: boo!
information (ok, maybe a touch of infotainment)
shorter: it’ll be a big fat middle class world… liberal, happy and informed
May 14th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Well, I watched about 30 seconds of the first clip and yes, I would say that is propaganda.
The second one is certainly entertaining, I love that spreadsheet program, is that available to the masses? I would love that for work. His analysis isn’t very good, I would like to see the guy who was debating him pick him apart, oh wait, there wasn’t anyone to counter his assertions, to bad. I’m not very smart or good with a crowd, but I could have tore him a new one.
May 16th, 2009 at 9:09 am
The software he used is called Trendalyzer. It was developed by his foundation. Apparently Google purchased the rights to it a few years ago. Some elements are freely available from Google now.
Wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trendalyzer
Google’s download page:
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=www.google.com/ig/modules/motionchart.xml
May 16th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Thanks!