The Rabbit Hole

In my Google+ feed the other day I found a link to a hot-off-the-e-press blog that my e-buddy Lee Baker (that's DR Lee to those of you who are not in our intimate Google+ circle!) had just published. Lee, who is coiffed similarly to Thor, is a data scientist and CEO of Chi-Squared Innovations, and we became connected either through a group in LinkedIn or one or both of our blogs. Lee's latest blog is a delightful romp through data types, and I highly encourage all to read it (*spoiler alert: there's a quiz at the end. If you don't want to take the quiz, don't read this spoiler alert). Yours truly, on the other hand, does not have Thor-like hair, and is also not a data scientist. However, as we're both interested in data....

*Warning: Rabbit hole 2m ahead.

Lee's blogs to date have included very nice infographics, presented at the speed of "Git along, little dogie," rather than, "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" He got me on this one, though. Please note: he's the data scientist; I'm just a regular guy trying to build my version of 42.

*Warning: You are standing on the Rabbit Hole, which has a ©Acme Industries tag.

...and down the rabbit hole we go. I'm reading the blog, and it is making sense and is easily digestible. I get to the bottom of the first infographic, and there is a row called "MEANINGFUL ZERO" Now, I may not be a data scientist, or have any training in statistics or quantitative analysis, but I do know a thing or two about Google, Bing, boolean search and the interwebz. I searched for at least fifteen minutes, which as everyone knows is a long time in internet time. My best attempts yielded...

"Nothing." "Result not found." "Term not understood." "Are you kidding?" "Everyone knows that...."

Ha ha- some of those results are quite obviously fabricated, but the lack of results are what prompted me to name this The Rabbit Hole. Being a moderately resourceful dude, I took some stabs in the dark. First, I tried stastics.com; cool site, but my search returned "No results found".Another stab in the dark- data.com. This site is the home of Salesforce, one of the dominant players in CRM software. I tried WolframAlpha, the publishers of Mathematica, and turned up nothing  *ahem* meaningful. Mathwords.com had nothing, but they did have a Google search widget, so I typed in "meaningful+zero". You guessed it- zilch. I tried actuary.org, home to the American Academy of Actuaries- no luck. A stab in the dark... I searched "data analysis vocabulary" in Google and got a hit on quizlet.com, which had twenty-seven DA terms... none of which was meaningfiul zero.  As a last resort, I tried about.com, and got nothing. 

I think I will, at this point, consult with a human or multiple humans.

There are no data updates; this entire blog has been dedicated to data and it's acquisition. I feel very much like Johnny 5 at this point: Need INPUT!"  Well, correction to that: we are M-270 on the Outback!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and managment so you don't have to.