Tag Archives: baby names

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Sometimes I am asked: How is it that you became a famous minor internet personality?

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Baby name article in the Sydney Morning Herald Okay, I stole the title from John Hodgman, who spoke at Google recently. And to be really fair, I should add more modifiers to the title, “briefly famous” being much more accurate.

Hodgman, who writes in the great tradition of literary nonsense, has a very entertaining story of minor fame in his new book More Information Than You Require. He has inspired me to write a a less entertaining story about the minor internet fame that our baby naming project has bestowed upon me.

Earlier today I was interviewed on The Morning Show, broadcast all across the great nation-continent of Australia. Since my kayak is in the shop, I was to go to KNTV in San Jose where the interview would be done live via satellite.

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Choosing a Unique Baby Name with Statistics

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We’ve got well over 10,000 votes, we know that the vote totals are significantly different from random, so do we have enough information to pick a name yet?

There’s another stats exercise I want to go through before we narrow down the list.  We want to pick a name that people have voted for, but we’d also like to choose a name that’s not too popular.  This is just a personal preference that Ann and I have, we think it’s a little more fun to have a more unique name.

Also, it would be pretty boring if the vote gives us the exact same information as a list of most popular baby names.  So, how to do we choose a name that’s popular with friends and family (and in our case, random internet strangers), that’s still reasonably unique?

Based on the chart below, names that fit our criteria include Ada, Cassia, Athena, Erin, or Olivia for a girl and Nikolas, Levi, Isaac, Dylan or Alexander for a boy.  Follow along and I’ll explain where I got the data and how it helps me pick names.

Scatterplot of baby name votes versus baby name popularity

Link to the full-sized graph at Flickr.

The graph you see above is a scatterplot of the names, showing the vote total versus the number of babies given that name in the U.S. in 2007.  For example, Isaac has 1220 votes as of this writing and 10,066 babies were named Isaac in 2007.

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Baby Name Significance (and other gratuitous statistics puns)

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Twisted tree branches

Now that we have more than 10,000 votes in our baby name poll I can start doing some basic statistical analysis.  One of the things I’d like to do is figure out which names are popular in our poll, but still relatively unique compared to all those other babies being named out there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to make sure that our vote totals are significantly different from random.

Heads up:  What follows is a basic intro to some concepts in statistics that I’m writing mainly to keep myself sharp.  I haven’t done much research recently and I don’t want to get rusty.  Feel free to read along, at the end I’ll show you how to detect the influence of Australians.

Since the data for names included in the poll is completely different from the write-in votes, we’ll concentrate on the pre-selected names for now.

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