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Adobe Building Zoetrope, a Web "Time Machine"
Khuffie writes "Adobe, along with the University of Washington, are developing Zoetrope, an application that will offer a dynamic new view of the web. It is hard to explain on paper, but you can see a brilliant video of the application in action. Essentially, Zoetrope will allow users to travel back in time through a website, and see how the website gets changed. A user can create lenses on the website, for example, focusing on the price of a DVD at Amazon, and see how the price went up and down over the coming months. More interestingly, you can link lenses together across different websites, and for example, see how the price of gas was affected by say, the aggregated google news result of 'war.'"
Actually, zoetrope is descriptive and apt.
From the article: "Kris Carpenter, who directs efforts to record Web pages at the Internet Archive, is enthusiastic about the new tool. "This is a fantastic leap forward," she says, adding that Zoetrope could be used as a stand-alone application or eventually become part of the browser. "The advances of the interface are phenomenal in terms of being able to navigate data in a very different way and associate it across websites," Carpenter says. "I think most users have an interest in trying to connect the dots between different sources of information, but there are almost no tools available to make that an easy thing to do." She adds that the Internet Archive is interested in sharing its data with the Zoetrope researchers."
Let the lawsuits fly!
That's not completely accurate. The completely accurate form is:
Degree of correlation implies a certain probability of some causal link (either direct or through a shared cause.)
Its quite possible for corresponding values from two completely unrelated sequences to show some degree of correlation, after all. If I have two sequences whose corresponding (e.g., by time) values lok like this:
S1: 1 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 1
S2: 2 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 2
I certainly might suspect that there is a tight correlation between S1 and S2, but each of them could just be random integers chosen from the range 1 to 6, inclusive. Using statistics, I can say how unlikely that coincidence is, but that doesn't mean that I can simply state as a fact that there is a causal link because there is a correlation.