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Showing posts from April, 2012

Beards over time; Facial hair and the Economy

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Research starts with a question. Here's the question: Do you see more people with facial hair when the economy turns south? Or, does facial hair run on its own cycles? Luckily, lots of historical data is available about the economy. We have freely-available records of unemployment, market returns, and recessions are studied extensively. But what about beards... we can only access a full library of tagged and timestamped photos for the full US population back through 2007 with Facebook timeline. We'll want to span over several generations with this research using a reliable representative of men's fashion over each year. Equire's Apparel Arts  (then Gentlemen's Quarterly , now just GQ ) is just the type of source we need. In it is a collection of photos and articles showing the latest trends in men's fashion. The Philadelphia Central Library has the full collection of microfilm and prints needed to make this analysis possible. METHOD Over the cour

Google prejudice

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All of this data was produced 100% automatically by Google Suggest on  this Google Docs spreadsheet , which you can edit to make your own funny blog posts. Black people Jewish people Indian people Chinese people always die first in movies n/a n/a n/a smell like n/a n/a curry moth balls put grease in their hair rocks on graves n/a n/a wear their pants so low yamakas n/a masks eat tootsie rolls with a fork kosher food with their hands dogs have big lips big noses dots on their heads slanted eyes My boyfriend My girlfriend My dog always puts me down talks about her ex smells thinks im fat im cheating her toy is her baby wears my clothes diapers eats me out too much poop UPDATE 2012-04-24