Marshmallows

A great take on the children, restraint, and marshmallows experiment over at Math Babe's blog. She does great work and everyone should learn from her.

All the Data? Yes.

Been quiet here since I took a three-month post over at Democracy Works for the Voting Information Project (you know, twelve hour days, weekends, all that, which still means a lot easier hours-wise than being a professor). It's an ongoing, yet outwardly an election-year, project with Google and the Pew Charitable Trust to help get voters information about when and where to vote as well as ballot information (ok technically that's the Ballot Information Project, but it's all bundled together into one end product).

So we had to get.... ALL THE DATA... for every polling location in the 50 US states and DC. Some states partner with the project, but for the ones that don't we had to make lots of web visits to county websites and phone calls to county clerks. LOTS.

It was awesome. But, it took all my time. And, you can't even see it anymore! If you Googled something to the effect of "where do I vote" you'd get an infobox, and could enter your address, geocoding magic would happen, and you could get a map to your polling location!

Awesome.