I dig the brutal honesty of your comment. And I refer to others as ‘wannabe-web2.0-billionaire code monkeys’ about once a week. You would fit right in at Swivel.

Dmitry and I both studied physics (although Dmitry is at least 10x smarter) in college. At University of Michigan I did research on complex systems and fell in love with the way patterns would emerge on a scatter plot or the way a simple delay-differential equation could generate crazy, yet repeatable time series.

If you look around, there is plenty of _software_ for data (Excel, Mathematica, etc.) but there isn’t a _Web site_ for data. We’re building Swivel so curious people have a Web site where they can explore data.

BTW, if you have a science or math background, we are hiring sharp-minded people at Swivel.

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

Just out of curiousity, are all the members of the swivel.com team just wannabe-web2.0-billionaire code monkeys? Or do you actually have a data analyst/scientist on the team?

Hint: Correlation does NOT imply causation. What a waste of bandwidth.

I’ll check back as you fine tune things.

Take Care.

Statistics are like a very small bikini — they reveal much but hide that which is most interesting/valuable, making you only want to see more!

This is fresh. Great job.

Thank you for the criticism — every point you made is valid and we have a bunch of work to do there.

The mysterious Y scale is either relative to average, or relative to range of the data series. This is shown in edit view but it is not apparent anywhere else so we’ll have to fix that.

We also will be adding the ability to normalize values, for things like adjusting for inflation. One thing to keep in mind is that we don’t control what our users put into Swivel and can’t dictate that they normalize their data where makes sense, but we will certainly need to make it easy, so this is a good one.

Finally, we’re working on better support for units, so it will be apparent that it was 2.1 gallons of wine.

Sincere thank you again for the good feedback.

Dmitry Dimov
Product Chief & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

http://www.swiv...hs/show/1001967

1)In 1980, there were 1,344,520 violent crimes in the U.S. according to the data as given below. What does a value of about -5% (instead of 1,344,520) on the y axis mean? What is being plotted on the Y axis? It’s not obvious to me.

http://bjsdata....tatebyState.cfm

2)What is the logic behind that oddly named Y axis on almost all graphs. Relative values? Percentages? Huh? Why not have an easily interpreted y axis at the beginning and end of the graph (one y axis per variable)? There is no explanation of the Y axis anywhere for any graph.

3)Using the NUMBER of violent crimes over time as your variable isn’t a good idea. As population grows over time, of course there will be more violent crimes — just like the NUMBER of violent crimes in a tiny state like Rhode Island will be a lot less than the NUMBER of crimes in a big state like New York. This is the issue of using levels versus rates in data. You should use a crime RATE to “normalize” things.

4)Regarding wine, in 1980 the data says U.S. per capita wine consumption was “2.1″ But 2.1 of what? Glasses, bottle, liters, what? I can’t find the exact data source (data sources are poorly cited in general on swivel) from the link given. And what does a y value of a little over 0 PERCENT for 1980 wine consumption mean? How did we get from 2.1 whatever to whatever is being plotted on the Y axis in the picture.

http://www.swiv...hs/show/1001967

…so I don’t know. Maybe swivel will be a good thing. Maybe it’s just introducing the the numerically challenged to excel graphs and providing links to data sources all over the internet for the unfamiliar data gatherers. It remains to be seen.

I think that the immortal Stevie Wonder said it best as far as armchair statistical analysis goes:

“If you believe in things that you don’t understand…then you suffer.”

(From the song Superstition)

Hopefully your efforts will be used for the benefit of social change and education…

LMAO from the amount of game related data already on the site I can only assume you have a few gamers in your office

We explored a few different methods for making graph generation fast. Glad you got that impression — it means we’re at least on the right track.

Huned (member of engineering staff at swivel)

Dmitry Dimov
Product Chief & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

Brian Mulloy
CEO & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com

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500 errors on homepage and other graphs.. ouch.