There are no end of hard problems to ask. Most of the really good ones aren't quite suitable for this blog--what is the nature of life? why is there something rather than nothing?
So I tend to pick problems that have some kind of observation about the world. Someone will ask me a question ("Is synesthesia consistent across people?") or I'll notice something odd about the world ("What is that anode thing in the middle of the street?") and that will lead to a search challenge.
For today's question I want to pose a more mundane, but in some ways even harder, much more pragmatic question. (And I ask this in the hope that you'll come up with a solution that I haven't thought of!)
Remember last week's question about the words kayak and tint? I thought so.
When I saw the data curves, I immediately wanted to make an animation of the US vs. New Zealand data showing the maps of both US and NZ growing darker/lighter with the value of each query volume.
This is the kind of practical question someone might ask a data analyst. Can you make me a cool animation that does... this cool thing?
So the challenge is this: Figure out how to make an animation of US vs. NZ that pulses the color of the country from white-to-black with the values of each query. I'll give you the data so you don't have to hassle it yourself.
Link to Google Spreadsheet with data.
Link to XSL version of data.
Link to CSV version of data.
Each version is 104 rows of data, one for each week of 2009 and 2010. The values vary from 0 - 100 , with 0 being the lowest query volume.
Go ahead, so us your animation! (And let us know how you did it!)
Search on!
So I tend to pick problems that have some kind of observation about the world. Someone will ask me a question ("Is synesthesia consistent across people?") or I'll notice something odd about the world ("What is that anode thing in the middle of the street?") and that will lead to a search challenge.
For today's question I want to pose a more mundane, but in some ways even harder, much more pragmatic question. (And I ask this in the hope that you'll come up with a solution that I haven't thought of!)
Remember last week's question about the words kayak and tint? I thought so.
When I saw the data curves, I immediately wanted to make an animation of the US vs. New Zealand data showing the maps of both US and NZ growing darker/lighter with the value of each query volume.
This is the kind of practical question someone might ask a data analyst. Can you make me a cool animation that does... this cool thing?
So the challenge is this: Figure out how to make an animation of US vs. NZ that pulses the color of the country from white-to-black with the values of each query. I'll give you the data so you don't have to hassle it yourself.
Link to Google Spreadsheet with data.
Link to XSL version of data.
Link to CSV version of data.
Each version is 104 rows of data, one for each week of 2009 and 2010. The values vary from 0 - 100 , with 0 being the lowest query volume.
Go ahead, so us your animation! (And let us know how you did it!)
Search on!
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