Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva are both Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Arizona. On Tuesday January 4 the number of hits on the "Gabrielle Giffords" page on Wikipedia began to rise. The number of hits on the "Raul Grijalva" page did not. By Friday January 7 more than three times as many people were looking at Gabrielle Giffords's Wikipedia page than had done so in a normal day in the previous month and a half.My suspicion is that this is simply coincidence and proves once again the dangers of drawing conclusions in the field of human action from historical data.
On Saturday January 8, of course, six people were murdered in the course of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords.
Please give me an explanation of this so that I can stop being a nutbar conspiracy theorist...
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Activity on Gabrielle Giffords Wikipedia Page Jumped Just Days Before She Was Shot
Brad DeLong nervously points out:
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CIA doing some research before their hit...
ReplyDeletemaking conclusions on historic data with just 3 weeks worth of data, is stupid at best.
ReplyDeletei am guessing she's probably on some news talk show or other media related events(or her husband is)....compared to Raul.
u would see these spikes more if we look at a 6 month or years of historic data. Then u won't stupidly correlate this assassination attempt to wiki traffic.
Other ways to write that sentence: "By Friday January 7 only one fifth as many people were looking at Gabrielle Giffords' wikipedia page than the first half of november"
ReplyDeletehttp://stats.grok.se/en/201011/Gabrielle_Giffords
"By Friday January 7 there was a spike in traffic to Giffords' wikipedia page, as happened all the time during 2010"
http://stats.grok.se/en/201003/Gabrielle_Giffords
http://stats.grok.se/en/201005/Gabrielle_Giffords
http://stats.grok.se/en/201007/Gabrielle_Giffords
"No on was looking at Giffords' wikipedia page before January 8th"
or
"Usage to Giffords' page jumped 100,000% percent on January 8th"
http://stats.grok.se/en/201101/Gabrielle_Giffords
"People are ten times more interested in baseball than Giffords"
or
"Someone was planning to assassinate baseball as usage spiked to nearly double its average since christmas"
http://stats.grok.se/en/201101/Baseball
All this proves is that Brad DeLong is a careless researcher.
ReplyDeleteGoogle site data is typically delayed about 24 hours. So the traffic gleaned from a site will be reported in the next day or two.
ReplyDeleteKen
www.smart10media.com