10,000 Brilliant Ideas

An idea stemmed from my conversation with a friend last night. For teens who's eyes have just been opened to the world, how about an on-line group where each logger-on fills out a profile for where they're from, and nationality, etc. and are then matched into a group with exactly one person from each country/region. The group defines a strong community and each member feels important since they are the only one of their kind in the group. Perhaps this could overcome the insulated effect that teens get into where the rest of the world is just too far away.

Why doesn't this exist? If it does, where is it? I want a tool not unlike gapminder that takes summary statistics from tons of studies and allows me to mash them together. Traditionally, this has been done with meta-analyses which are studies of studies that compare these outcomes and using different weights and probably other things (you want me to read wikipedia on this?) to come up with some sort of broad conclusion based on all the evidence. Granted, this may not be as scientifically sound, but hey, everyone's doing homemade ecological studies (these are the gapminder kind) and I don't see anyone cryin'. Here's the experience (for anyone I haven't lost) I have a kid who hates to wear his seatbelt (hypothetical here of course). I think what are the actual risks if you don't wear a seatbelt . So I look up the Meta-analysis explorer under seat-belts for kids and I narrow it down to around his age range and I get some statistic like, A kid in the US who does

Dear reader, I address you as reader, because I am making the brash assumption that there is one of you. I realize this may be an overestimation. Unless I include myself. You may think this blog is getting rusty and dusty. That I've forgotten all about it. This is entirely sort of not true. The truth is I've been throwing in posts now and again, but I only save them as drafts meaning to polish them up later. Yeah, hm. So now, I'm posting willy nilly. You're getting it raw and uncut. If I do come back and edit, it will be on the live post. So if you're hoping one of these will never change, tough beans. Copy it to your hard-drive, you. Get off my back! You don't know what it's like to be me!!!!! Sorry, but that is the rawness I'm talking about. From now on, you're getting draft posts whenever I think of em. I may give it a read over before posting, but maybe not. I'm a productionist afterall not a perfektionist. Be warned, I may be straining the d