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Today's statistics are dedicated to the memory of Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) notable inventor and statistician, who died 77 years ago.

Hollerith (much like me :P ) was born in New York, to German parents. After graduating as an Engineer of Mining, he took a job with the US Census Bureau, where he dealt with statistical data of the steel industry.

Later, he spent his time researching a new technology to gather census data more efficiently. Inspired by a the punch-card mechanism of an automatic weaving loom (the Jacquard loom), he built a machine that would store data as a series of holes which would be read by electric contacts, and sorted and counted automatically.

The gain in efficiency was immense. The US Census of 1880, counting 50 million residents, had taken seven years to evaluate. The census of 1890 - the first one using Hollerith's tabulating machine - took only 2.5 years to tabulate 62 million people.
Having gained renown from the government contract, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (today known as IBM), and sold (or rather leased) his appliances to many census bureaus and insurance companies world-wide.

His key invention - the punch-card as a means of writing, storing and processing data automatically - influenced the next century of computing technology. Programs were first hard-wired into computer systems and read their data from stacks of punch-cards; later, following the introduction of programming languages, assemblers and compilers, the programs were written on punch-cards themselves.

FORTRAN is one example for a language that was written almost exclusively on punch-cards, and whose fixed-form syntax still reflects that.

Since then, punch-cards as a means of storage have been replaced by hard-drives, floppy disks, CDs and eventually Flash memory - and nobody's really written them with a key-puncher since the rise of terminals, command lines and text editors. But as storage devices go, they are about the only one that would survive being folded in half and falling from a third-floor window onto a big magnet. And also, they make excellent note cards.

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The PHP script I wrote back in February 2005 has also been updated and rewritten many times - from its early days of generating a comma-separated file that went into an excel table, to generating an SQL file that went into a database, to updating the database directly. These days, so much of it is automated that I hardly need to lift a finger in operating it - notice that I am not even making this post today.

A lot has changed since the beginning, but it originally started out as merely a primitive machine that listed member numbers and displayed names automatically, as opposed to dedicated people killing hours of their time doing it.
The first Spiderweb census took a year. These days, we're down to about 3-4 hours - every month. All in all, a nice evolution of technology. And now, back to EndeavorBot!

--Aran

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Originally written by Kelandon:

Bad spammers. Bad.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

Well, I'm at least pretty sure that Salmon is losing.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

Also, Salmon is shameless.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

Well, I'm at least pretty sure that Salmon is losing.

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Originally written by Ephesos:

Um... Aran? The lists on Endeavor are broken. All of them.

EDIT: Well, when accessed through the sidebar, anyway.

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% SPAM = 1 - (OCT / (NOV / 2))

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First, that every post in October was legitimate. Second, that every other post a person made this month which was ABOVE their October value is spam.

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First, that every post in October was legitimate. Second, that every post in November that was ABOVE double their October value was spam.

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Originally written by Aran the Absent:

Postage has taken off like there's no tomorrow.

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Slarty:

[math]

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Originally written by Sirrus:

[QUOTE]Edit: And you made the same mistake I made first - overlooking the "every other". In fact, only half of the difference is spam, but the formula is still wrong. :D

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Originally written by EndeavorBot:

Not only have we had 88 new active members; 160 more have seen fit to continue to grace this board with their presence, adding up to 187.

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Originally written by Artequila:

Now, a fairer % SPAM definition might take into account the difference between proactive and reactive posting. Since everyone more or less doubled their post count -- only Kelandon is really below the 200% mark, and him not by much -- a certain % increase can probably be written off as reactive posting rather than spam.

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Originally written by S is for Synergy:

I feel like the Spiderweb community has been seduced by the American anthem that “too much is never enough.” I tend to subscribe to the “less is more” Japanese aesthetic

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