Worldometers - one cool web site

The image is a screenshot from a website called Live Statistics in the USA. It's related to Worldometers, which provides real time world statistics. There's a screenshot of it, below. Sometimes its fascinating to watch the number of babies born today click up. But there's more to the site than that. There's data transparency. Wondering about that figure of 931 US homicides this year (as of January 22)? If you click on the "Info" button you get this:

[R]ates per 100,000 people are decreasing steadily since 1991, and are now back at the levels of the mid 1960's after being at twice the current rate in the 70's and 80's. Current estimates are based on CDC data.

The CDC link takes you to CDC's Faststats page. As with anything else, you need to do a little thinking: the figure of 931 is a calculation based on the CDC's rate of 5.3 homicides per 100,000 population, 21 or so days into the year.

Here's a screenshot from Worldometers:

Predictive data modeling using Kaggle

Kaggle is a startup tech site that lets organizations post datasets and ask world wide users to predict how their customers, clients or patients will behave. It's set up as a competition, and the organizations pay for the best solution with a prize. Here's Kaggle's video explanation:

Kaggle claims on its website always to have outperformed pre-existing accuracy benchmarks, because it draws on a wide range of competitors who keep trying to better each other's work. I can see many applications in social services and yes, you can post scrubbed, anonymous data; you can even post variables as A, B, C without stating what the variables are.

Competitors have already improved NASA's algorithms for mapping dark matter; there's a competition under way to predict hospital stays; and there are classroom applications available so that students can use unknown datasets.

I learned about Kaggle from an Atlantic posting called "The 20 Most Innovative Startups in Tech" by Rebecca Rosen. Check out the article for more interesting websites.