Site insight
OUR MONTHLY SELECTION OF THE WEB’S MOST ILLUMINATING, USEFUL OR JUST-PLAIN-COOL WEB SITES.
Best Time to Visit Anywhere ‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE CERTAIN. tinyurl.com/bsttmtvst
This website is an excellent example of big data being used to directly help the public, and in this case, it’s coming to the aid of prospective travellers seeking warmer climes. The Best Time to Visit Anywhere web page offers a collection of average global temperatures throughout the year displayed on a simple-to-navigate world map. Impressively, the data was compiled from over 35 million recordings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA) spanning over a decade, although the heavy lifting was done by reddit user /u/ryan_data who is responsible for turning this raw data into a user-friendly website. The end result is the ability to choose any given week of the year and then set a number of parameters to suit your temperature preference (the range for mean, low and high temperatures) as well as the number of days of rain experienced in that week. The map will then plot each of the weather stations or buoys as dots on the map, conveniently renamed by /u/ryan_data to the nearest town or city, based on 10 years’ worth of data for that week.
Learn Anything EDUCATE THE MASSES. learn-anything.xy
Learn Anything is an open-source website where you can learn about... well, anything. After you search for your desired topic — whether it’s a language, an academic field or even a specific theory —you’ll be presented with a mindmap that links to relevant material on the matter, or further breaks it down into subcategories that you can follow to find even more specific resources. The material itself comes from a wide variety of sources, such as TED talk videos, online articles and papers, purchase links for physical textbooks, wiki pages and even online university courses. The website is open source as well, which hopefully means that the amount of resources under each umbrella of a topic will slowly grow as the community builds and users include their own suggestions for learning materials. While there are certainly better education websites focused on much more specific and dedicated topics, Learn Anything will likely be useful for people wanting to know where to begin with their learning.
Will Robots Take My Job? FIND OUT HOW PARANOID YOU SHOULD BE. willrobotstakemyjob.com
Don’t worry, this website is more than just a plain white page with the word “yes” on it. It’s actually a web tool based on a report published in 2013 by University of Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, which covered the susceptibility of jobs to computerisation. The report focused on US employment in particular but is widely applicable to countries with similar workforce distributions, such as Australia and the UK, and found that around 47% of US jobs are at risk. This page is a searchable catalogue of the 702 different occupations covered by the report and will give you an overall risk of automation as a percentage. Beyond this, the website will also provide some interesting information on the profession, such as the number of people employed in the field (in the US), the median annual wage (in US$) and the projected growth by 2024. Journalists seem to be relatively safe, with an 11% likelihood of automation, whereas a role such as ‘hand sewer’ has a 99% chance of being replaced by robotics.