vative. Although young women are perceived as more liberal than young men, that gap disappears after 25.

The raw data is available at http://data. doloreslabs.com, and O'Reilly's Beautiful Data features the full experiment and useful hacks for processing data.

 

CROWDSOURCING BENFORD’S LAW If you asked someone to pick a number, what would it be? What's the likelihood that it would begin with one? How about seven, or two? Benford's Law states that about 30 percent of the leading digits will be ones, 17. 6 percent will be twos, and so on down to around 4. 6 percent of the numbers beginning with nine.

Because we had easy access to a large pool of people, we tested the law by asking subjects to pick any number greater than zero. In a little over an hour, we received 500 valid results that roughly corresponded to the law, as you can see in Figure 7. However, some laws were made to be broken, and we did notice a slight departure from the law when it came to people who chose numbers beginning with four and five. While 42 subjects chose a number beginning with four, 51 subjects chose a number beginning with five.

CROWDSOURCING ETHICS
Crowds can also be used to source an-
swers to philosophical questions. Sta-
lin said, “A single death is a tragedy; a
million deaths is a statistic.” So what
about 100 deaths? What about five? We
tested this experimentally by asking
people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to
participate in the classic philosophical
conundrum “The Trolley Problem,” in
which a person must decide whether
to sacrifice one person in order to save
several others.

Figure 6: The graph above shows attractiveness based on subjects' perceived age.

Figure 5: A scatterplot matrix of the attributes: Every pair of attributes has two graph panels. The bottom-left panels are simply x-y scatterplot with trendlines for each attribute pair. The top-right panels show corrgrams of Pearson correlations: blue=positively correlated attributes, and red=negatively correlated ones. Looking at the attributes near the center, we see that conservatism, wealth, intelligence, and trustworthiness are all positively correlated with each other, hence the dark blue squares. Attractiveness is more complex. It tends to show a peak in the middle of the graph, especially with intoxication, age, and political affiliation.

Figure 7: University of California-Berkeley PhD candidate Aaron Shaw plotted this data showing the results from 500 workers who were asked to pick a single digit greater than zero. All the numbers are sorted by magnitude and leading digit. The height captures the frequency of that leading digit. The size of the numerals corresponds to the magnitude of the number, and the color corresponds roughly to its order of magnitude (red=big). Within each digit, the numbers are sorted along the y-axis.