Activity 1 - Check out your names on the Internet
Before we do any coding, let us look on the Internet and see what we can find...
- Your Name - How popular was your name when you were born? See what is out there...
(What is in a name? Song: A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash)
You may have not found your name on any of those sites. The best of them only do the top 1,000 names. So we are going to do it ourselves with the raw data. We are going to download all the names (roughly 30,000 names), sort them and see exactly where yours is. We can also have fun looking at the different variations of your name and where they are (e.g. Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn, and Katelynn are considered separate names and each has its own rank) We can also look at other years and see if the popularity of your name is increasing/decreasing or staying the same from year to year.
Data/ Big Data Every year, they come out with the top 10 most popular boys and girls names for that year. Is yours one of the top ones? Mine wasn't. Do you wonder where your name is in that list of names? Would you like to find out?
Let us find out. We will download all the names of everyone that was born the same year that you were. Then we will sort the names alphabetically, then count them. We will find out where your name is, how many other people were given the same name and how many variations of your name are out there.
We will look at these questions using Big Data (all the names in the U.S. since 1897)
Fun Assignment:
Part A - Using other websites Go to some of the following websites and see how many of the following questions you can answer:
Social Security Admin - Baby Names - A good example is the names site of the Social Security Admin. where they record new social security numbers. They also keep track of the most popular baby names every year from 1879. You can download all the data for the entire period (from 1879 to 2014).
Other baby name sites of interest:
- Is your name one of the top 1,000 most popular names?
- If not, what number is it? the top 100? the top 500? the top 1,000? the top 10,000?
- Are there any derivations/spellings close to your name that are higher? e.g. Caitlin, Caitlyn, Kaitlin, Kaitlyn, Kaitlynn, Katelyn, and Katelynn are considered separate names and each has its own rank
- How many others were given the same name in the year that you were born?
- Is your name's popularity increasing or decreasing over the years?
- Can you tell the rough age (in decades) that a person is by their name?
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