Radiance Blog

As a firm that works with large databases for our clients, this article strikes home. Working with big databases is hard work.  It’s not just the mechanics of data manipulation and calculations, but also knowing where the data come from, what they mean, and how to interpret them.  You have to have a feel for [...]

We’re doing some research at the moment on college student demographics in Missouri, and developed some fun statistics on the foreign student population. You might be able to guess the two largest populations of foreign students, particularly if you went to an engineering college – Chinese, then Indian.  But what countries occupy Spots 3 through [...]

The Bureau of the Census recently released a document(pdf) describing the age and gender profile of America over the past few decades. Some interesting capsules that we see in it are: Everyone knows about the whole “aging boomer” thing, so we won’t belabor that point. However, it’s interesting to see that another fast-growing segment is [...]

If search trends are any indication of what people are doing (and they are), then you’re not alone if you are doing your taxes last minute. During the last two years as indicated by the orange and red lines (and previous years too – just not displayed) we see a small spike in February (people [...]

We love data.  Give us a bunch – or allow us to go gather it on our own – and we’ll roll around in it for hours.  Ok, maybe that sounds mildly creepy. We talk a lot about the virtues of data, but there is one important caveat – you have to have good data. [...]

Ever feel like you have too much data to sift through?  That simple search results aren’t enough?  Or that that bar chart just doesn’t convey the big picture? Enter Pivot. As the Economist recently described in a special report, the amount of data we are creating is immense.  So much so that we can’t even [...]

I was in a small town in California two weeks ago, and was on the lookout for a birthday card for my nephew.  I wandered into a small “alternative” card shop and found a really cool Hindu-themed birthday card.  My nephew’s not Hindu, but I like to keep him on his toes, so I bought [...]

We like baseball here at Corona.  Well, at least Leo, Dave and I like baseball. We enjoy the crack of the bat, the smell of the grass, and, because we’re data junkies, the mountains of statistics. Baseball and statistics are inseparable.  There seems to be a stat for every aspect of the game from the [...]

Like last year, we offer up our foresight on some of the top trends in our field for 2010. Although the year has already started, hopefully we haven’t missed anything in its first weeks. Some of the trends we noted last year – economic pressures, instantaneous research – will continue and become even more pronounced. [...]

We use numbers at Corona for all sorts of purposes…analyzing a business’s data, segmentation analysis, demographics…and the list goes on. But for all the fun we have with numbers (not a typo), we always enjoy hearing the many other ways numbers impact our lives. What’s Benford’s Law? Do you have an Erdos number? Check out [...]