It’s been just over a month since I launched wisdomofchopra.com and my word has it been nuts! About six weeks ago I was told that I was going to be made redundant from my previous web development job, and for some reason I thought to myself “right then, I’ll make a website this weekend!”. Naturally, I went on Twitter looking for inspiration, and came across a tweet suggesting that the words of one Deepak Chopra were indistinguishable from a selection of profound words randomly thrown together (I think it was the New Humanist account, but I’m not sure). Having had experience with making rather crude random sentence generators I thought I could fairly easily make a website which took the words of Chopra and stuck them together. After just two nights of hard graft, wisdomofchopra.com was born.
I really wasn’t expecting much from it, but I am still amazed by the response it has generated. In that initial weekend, it got over 20,000 hits! It has been fairly extensively and positively blogged about (including by PZ Myers, so he’s not all bad! 😉 ) and even ended up being used on the SGU podcast! I extended the site, adding a quiz to see if people could tell the difference between real Deepak Chopra quotes and those generated by the website. I think my proudest moment in this whole episode was trying the quiz out on an Indian ex-colleague who has actually read some of Chopra’s books, he only managed three out of seven before angrily giving up! As I write this, there have so far been 28,578 responses to the quiz, of which 19,131 have been correct. That means that just 66.92% of the responses have been correct. If any statisticians are reading this, could you tell me if that is significant or not?
To take it to the next level, I really need a web designer to take a look at wisdomofchopra.com. Could you take the website and make it look really good? Although I’m quite good at programming (I got another web dev job pretty much straight away in case you are wondering) my design skills are rather lacking. I can’t offer that much in the way of pay (well, maybe something), but you’ll certainly be credited on the site and it will look good on your CV. So, if you are a web designer at any level, please get in touch!
Katatrepsis
Yep, substantially different from chance 🙂 Binomial test is what you’re looking for, I think:
> binom.test(19131,28578,0.5)
Exact binomial test
data: 19131 and 28578
number of successes = 19131, number of trials = 28578, p-value < 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: true probability of success is not equal to 0.5
95 percent confidence interval:
0.6639425 0.6748851
sample estimates:
probability of success
0.669431
Tom
So a binomial test shows that quotes from Deepak Chopra ARE significantly different from those randomly generated? Damn!