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Find your Species Name on Darwin's Birthday!

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Cool! Thanks! The App went viral over the weekend, especially on Tumblr. So, I thought it will be interesting to share some results. I created a Databin in order to store all the entries of the App and track its usage easily. During the last 3 days the App gathered more than 53000 names. In the list there are many "Darwin" entries because it is the default input of the App. We can get rid of them using DeleteCases:

bin = Databin["binID"];
names = DeleteCases[Flatten[TextWords[ToLowerCase[Values[bin]]]], "darwin"];

Now we can visualize the most popular names with the WordCloud function:

WordCloud[names]

enter image description here

It is easy to guess that the female names are more abundant. And we can check this in a quantitative way using Classify with the "NameGender" built-in classifier:

WordCloud[names, ColorFunction -> (If[Classify["NameGender", #2] === "Female", Orange,Purple] &)]

enter image description here

We can also visualize the percentages with a PieChart:

genderProb = Classify["NameGender", names, "TopProbabilities"];

PieChart[100 N[Values[genderCounts]/Total[Values[genderCounts]]], 
     ChartLabels -> {Style["Female names", Bold, FontSize -> 20], 
       Style["Male names", Bold, FontSize -> 20]}]

enter image description here

From the Databin we can also get the "TimeStamps" and easily visualize the usage over time in Entries/Minute units with DateHistogram:

t = Databin["binID"]["Timestamps"];

DateHistogram[t, "Minute", PlotTheme -> "Detailed", TimeZone -> -5,
             PlotRange -> {{{2016, 2, 12}, {2016, 2, 15}}, Automatic}, 
             PlotLabel -> Style["Darwin App Usage (Entries/Minute)", Bold, FontSize -> 26]]

enter image description here

In the near future I will try to analyze the the Species associated with theses person names. In fact, many people were surprised to get mostly insects and spiders. But as a remark, note that mammals only account for 5,416 species out of more than 1 Million.

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POSTED BY: EDITORIAL BOARD
Posted 2 years ago

Enjoyed finding this, but a couple of minor points. Being an ichthyologist, I chose fishes.

1) Scientific names always have the genus group name capitalized and the species group name not capitalized.

2) Because zoological names are regarded as Latinized, the names should be written in an italic font.

3) I entered my own name, but was a wee bit disappointed to only see one of the three patronyms named for me listed. The program should be able to report more than one species name in some cases. Among fishes, names like cuvieri, bleekeri, guentheri, steindachneri, jordani, whitleyi, smithi, and randalli* are exceptional in this regard for very good reason.

4) adding an image of the species would be nice to add to the celbration.

Once while at the British Museum of Natural History I had the good fortune to examine the type specimen of the scorpionfish, Scorpaena histrio (Jenyns, 1840) collected by Charles Darwin himself. For me, this was a very special occasion indeed. A feeling of "connectedness came over me that made me fell a tiny bit more important than I actually am, for a brief moment anyway.

That said, I enjoyed this very much. Thank you for the submission.

POSTED BY: Stuart Poss
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