Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Building the human algorithm

 Posted by (Visited 8717 times)  Misc  Tagged with: ,
Jun 042008
 

Some academics (including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of the excellent Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means) have been doing analysis of human movements based on where people are making cell phone calls from.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mobile phones expose human habits

The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship – known as a power law.

“That was the first surprise,” he told BBC News.

Is it really a surprise anymore when something happens to have a power-law distribution?

In any case, it does seem like we are inching ever closer to Asimov’s psychohistory. Given enough data, why wouldn’t we be able to build predictive algorithms for large-scale human populations and social trends?

(Tuesday) Mailbag: forum posters, churn, betas

 Posted by (Visited 16650 times)  Game talk, Mailbag  Tagged with:
May 272008
 

Mr Koster, I am wondering if you can help me with a bit of online Mythbusting? I have an interest in statistics with relation to gamers and beta testers. This quote: “Something like 90% of the people playing an MMO never post in the forums.” was recently made here and attributed to you and Rich Vogel here. (please read the thread to see why I am interested) So, I was wondering if you could confirm this? How did you collect this data? And if so, what other data can you share? Do you know of any other sources of this sort of data? And, yes. I would be very happy to see this email posted and commented on in your blog. Thank you for your time and effort.

Regards, Guy Russon

Well, as far as how that stat comes about (and it does vary game to game — don’t take 10% as gospel, becaus eyou are right it’s a “whisper stat” at this point), you simply measure your subscribers, measure your active forum posters, and derive a ratio. 🙂 In the case of forums where they require a game registration in order to register for the forum, this is pretty easy.

Continue reading »

Scary stats redux

 Posted by (Visited 6242 times)  Open thread, Writing  Tagged with:
Apr 192008
 

Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.

Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.

So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all. 🙂

What WordPress needs

 Posted by (Visited 9660 times)  Misc  Tagged with: ,
Apr 162008
 

A plugin that

  • Greps every file in your public web directory, recursively, looking for “base64” and tells you about them. The default WP install has none of these.
  • Warns you on modification date of any file in the install, plus in any themes.
  • Checks header and footer for unusual size changes.
  • Warns you on any files added to install directories that are not something in the vanilla install — e.g., any new php files in wp-admin that aren’t part of the install.
  • Warns you on any .htaccess redirects.
  • Pulls out the list of administrators by querying in wp_usermeta for wp_metavalue containing %administrator% — not whatever the dashboard uses, which appears to correlate to other tables and therefore misses hacked accounts.
  • Generates a table of everything in wp_options that is not a part of the vanilla WP install, so you can check it. Sure, a whole bunch of plugins will show up, but maybe you can check that manually.

Doing all this by hand is getting old. 🙂 The saga continues at the other post, which continues to get updates.

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