{"id":12262,"date":"2012-06-25T13:53:51","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T12:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=4104"},"modified":"2012-06-25T13:53:51","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T12:53:51","slug":"facebook-is-huge-in-afghanistan-and-zimbabwe-or-maybe-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/facebook-is-huge-in-afghanistan-and-zimbabwe-or-maybe-not.html","title":{"rendered":"Facebook is HUGE in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Or Maybe Not."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"More<\/p>\n

A quick fun example of data quality garbage in, garbage out…*<\/p>\n

I once helped organize a user conference where a suspiciously large percentage of the audience came from Afghanistan, because of people lazily clicking on the first country on the registration page.<\/p>\n

It turns out that even web giants like Facebook and MySpace have the same problem. In the June 8th episode of the NPR show On The Media<\/a>, during a segment that discussed children\u2019s use of Facebook despite the age limit restrictions, researcher Danah Boyd<\/a> said:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the funny things that you will find on these sites is that a huge number of kids actually say that they are from Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, which are the countries alphabetically at the top and the bottom of the possible countries you can be from\u2026 so, based on the stats of Facebook and MySpace, there are more people online in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe than there are living there<\/strong>\u201d (@39\u201900\u2019\u2019)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s NOT funny is to realize that most of the time it\u2019s not as easy as this to recognize you have a data quality problem. What if the figures had only been 10% or 15% out? Would anybody have noticed the problem then? Or would they have happily accepted the figures and used them for (bad) decision making?<\/p>\n

Poor data quality is the number one technical problem preventing the successful deployment of analytic solutions. Every business should invest in good data quality solutions<\/a> that help detect and fix bad data.<\/p>\n

* Yes, I am well aware 3D charts are not “best practice” – this is deliberate, to annoy information purists whose attachment to visual information dogma distracts from more important topics – like bad data!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are more people online in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe than there are living there(?!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[81,342,404,481,483,1161],"class_list":["post-12262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-afghanistan","tag-data-quality","tag-dq","tag-facebook","tag-fail","tag-zimbabwe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3bM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}