Dog lovers, this one’s for you.  Today we’re releasing a new report called “Like dog, like owner? What our pooches reveal about us.“  Check out the full 25 page report HERE.

The report first explores the differences – from personality to hobbies to personal beliefs – between dog owners and people who don’t own a dog. Then, it provides deeper profiles of 44 popular breeds.

But the breed profiles don’t have to do with characteristics of the breeds themselves; they instead explore the common traits shared among the people who like that particular breed.  You may be surprised about how distinct the characteristics are among the human fans of various breeds.

So whether you’re talking about members of The American Kennel Club’s more than 500 breed-specific clubs or 5,000 affiliate clubs, considering some of the impassioned canine lovers at Dogster or the readers of any number of breed-specific blogs and sites, chances are that fans of specific breeds have a lot more in common with each other that just a favorite type of pooch.

Here’s the executive summary of the report:

Compared to Hunch users who don’t own a dog, Hunch dog owners have distinct personality traits, life experiences, and demographic characteristics among dozens of dimensions:

• In general, they are more conservative, somewhat older, more likely to enjoy “mainstream” media, more likely to be female, live in the suburbs and have children, but less likely to have completed 4 years of college.
• Other differences include their greater affinity for sports and the outdoors, an aesthetic preference for rustic and “homey” furniture, and a greater likelihood of having both a security system and a firearm in their home.

Among groups of Hunch users expressing an affinity for a particular breed of dog, distinct traits again surface:

• Women tend to favor terriers, dogs with long hair, and some of the smaller breeds
• Men tend to favor the hound family and retrievers
• Other correlations are less obvious and are best explored in the main report, for example:
  • Chihuahua fans tend to be frequent doodlers
  • German Shepherd fans tend to rely more on intuition than common sense
  • Pug fans particularly enjoyed the movie The Shawshank Redemption
  • West Highland Terrier (Westie) fans think the world needs more “Family Values”, while Bull Mastiff fans would volunteer to be Tasered “just to see what it feels like” (have fun!)

There are hundreds more interesting correlations in the main analysis section of the full report.  And if your breed of choice isn’t one of the 44 profiled in the report, don’t fret.  The report’s appendix also lists all 212 purebreds and cross-breeds from Hunch’s dog breeds topic, together with links to each of their correlation reports on the Hunch site.

If this topic intrigues you, you might also check out Anahad O’Connor’s interesting NYT piece from last August.  It describes several studies exploring whether people resemble their dogs.  Fascinating reading.  And finally, for those extreme individualists out there who cringe at the thought of being grouped in a ’similarity cluster’, even if it’s innocuously based on an affinity for a particular dog breed, we have a suggestion.  For your next pooch, head on over to the nearest shelter and get a lovable mutt.  When someone asks what the breed is, you can say, “Beats me, he’s just Rover.”  But guess what?  Hunch was even able to find similarities among mutt fans. When it comes to data, you can run, but you can’t hide.

Again, you can check out the full 25 page dog breeds report in either a downloadable pdf format or the web HTML version. You can find more reports in the reports section of the Hunch site.

To date, Hunch users have added more than 40,000 tags to their profiles (if that doesn’t include you yet, step to it…).  We decided to take a look at which tags are most popular, focusing on a breakdown between users residing in North America vs. Europe.  We used a THAY question about ‘country of residence’ to get the geographic breakdown and then examined the top 200 tags by frequency for each continent.

Turns out that 13 of each continent’s top 15 tags are the same: music, liberal, food, mac, creative, books, travel, technology, funny, art, geek, movies, and photography.  In fact, of the top 200 tags on each respective side of the pond, 134, or 2 out of 3, are shared.  So, we are more ‘the same’ than ‘different’ (group hug).

But where do things differ between the two sides of the pond?

The top 25 tags used uniquely by Europeans among these ‘top 200′ data sets include: programming, london, piano, languages, jazz, italy, english, cinema, films, british, socialist, metal, it, google, clever, web design, web 20, uk, optimist, ipod, innovation, humour, german, european, and europe.  And as far as common tags that skew significantly stronger in Europe: internet, design, music, sci-fi, web, photography, philosophy, computer, atheist, rock, geek, lazy, indie, male, and football.

So I suppose you could say that Hunch Europeans are a bunch of lazy, socialist, piano-playing geeks who find themselves clever and innovative.  Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they’re optimistic, humourous (with an extra ‘u’) web designers who are into languages and cinema.  You pick.

The top 25 tags used uniquely by Hunchers in North America (and not appearing in the European top 200) include: artistic, family, loving, tall, married, husband, outgoing, outdoors, caring, musician, new york, nyc, hiking, athletic, libertarian, adventurous, thoughtful, teacher, american, canadian, canada, engineer, witty, spiritual, and silly.  Common tags that skew significantly stronger in North America include liberal, writer, conservative, dogs, reader, mac, father, smart, creative, green, christian, artist, cooking, travel, and video games.

So clearly, Hunch users in North America tend to be tall, liberal artists who think of themselves as caring and outgoing.  On the other hand, they’re also Christian conservatives who enjoy hiking, dogs, and the outdoors.

Probably the most accurate conclusion to all of this analysis is that you Hunchers are an incredibly diverse bunch.

Finally, we came across a nifty site called Many Eyes, developed by – of all companies – IBM.  It combines many things we love: cool data visualization techniques, data exploration, and public data sets…what’s not to love about all of that?  The graphics below are an outcome of running our tags through one of the visualization techniques on Many Eyes.

The top 200 tags among North American Hunchers:

Top 200 tags in the profiles of North American Hunch users

Top 200 tags in the profiles of European Hunch users

We had some discussion in the office yesterday about some of the posts in the Hunch forums.  We’ve been beyond pleased about the amount of forum suggestions and feedback we’ve received.  This input is invaluable in helping us define and prioritize what to keep, emphasize, refine, change, or improve.

It’s also been great to see an increasing amount of direct interaction in the forums between Hunch users.  For example, we’ve noted a growing number of forum posts from users asking for a recommendation related to a topic, with other users generally responding with good advice.  So one user might post: “Which handheld camera might be best for a low-light situation?” or “Do you think my 5 year old is ready for kindergarten even if he can’t sit still for a reasonable period of time?”  Sure, these questions could be answered by ‘playing’ Hunch’s topics in the traditional way, but – why not? – this alternative approach to posting a question and getting an answer is perfectly fine, too.

There are, however, a couple of types of questions we sometimes see in the forums which aren’t particularly well-suited to Hunch: questions of an absolute or factual nature.

An absolute question is something like: “What’s the best Chinese restaurant in Des Moines?” or “What’s the best museum in Paris?”  The first answer to questions like those is simply: “It depends.”  Are you looking for great Chinese take-out or a Chinese restaurant offering a white tablecloth experience?  Do you want a Paris museum that’s good for kids, known for contemporary art, or in a building of renowned architectural importance?

Hunch is also not the place to go to find cut-and-dry facts.  To figure out “On what day of the week does Christmas fall this year?” or “How many flight miles is it between New York and LA?”, we would cheerfully direct you to your nearest preferred search engine or answer site, which is exactly what we do for these types of queries.

So in a nutshell, Hunch isn’t meant to tell you what’s best for everyone, and isn’t meant to provide you with rote facts.  But for offering you smart recommendations that are customized to you and based on some serious math and data?  Now you’re talkin’.  And this is how we summed all that up in a phrase: “With Hunch, it’s never about simply ‘What’s Best?’, but rather: ‘What’s Best for You?’”

The Daily Beast included us in their roundup of 25 Ways to Get Smarter in 2010, just in time for 2010! Here we are, the Smarter Search Engine: Hunch.com:

A small group of MIT computer scientists has developed an algorithm called Hunch that works on a single premise: Groups of people make better decisions than individuals, even individual experts. Hunch is brilliant in its simplicity: It asks you narrower and narrower questions, and continues suggesting answers until it finds what you want. It then uses the your search to find even better answers for the next user. For instance, to the question, “What should I get my mom for her birthday?” Hunch might ask questions like, how much do you want to spend? How old is she? Is she conservative or liberal? Does she drink? In the six months since it was launched, users have already created over 5,500 decision topics and used it to purchase electronics, figure out what book to read, and plan entire vacations.

Performed by Lauren Gabriela and Peter Coles

There are lots of topics on Hunch which can give you a hand as you head into the home stretch of the holidays.  Here are just a few:

• Last Minute Christmas Gifts
• Christmas movies
• Should you take the window or aisle seat on your flight?
• Ways to pass the time on a long plane trip
• Ways to avoid being jetlagged
• NYC Car services
• How should you get to La Guardia airport from Manhattan?
• New Year’s Eve activities
• How to add flair to your New Year’s Eve outfit
• New Year’s Resolutions

Travel safely; have fun; happy holidays!

Today we’re releasing a new report called “Console Tribes: What Your Video Game System Says About You.”  The report explores differences in demographics, game preferences, leisure attitudes, media choices and other factors among fans of each of the 3 dominant gaming consoles: Wii, Xbox, and PS3.

Here’s the executive summary:

Demographics

• Age is likely a contributing causal factor for game console affinity, with fans of the appropriate age to remember the 1980s having a greater affinity for Wii versus Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.
• Fans of all platforms skew overwhelmingly male, but the Wii is the relatively most attractive console to women.
• Wii fans are more likely to be established in their families and careers, while Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 fans are primarily bachelors.
• Although the Xbox 360 has been available in the worldwide market much longer than the Playstation 3, the Playstation 3 resonates better with international markets.

Shared Experiences

• Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 fan groups show a divide with certain North American shared experiences.
• The affinity for sports felt by Xbox 360 fans and Playstation 3 fans is reflected in their belief that the issue of steroid usage in professional sports has been overblown by news media.
• Wii fans enjoy celebrity gossip more than Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 fans.

Console Games

• There is a significant overlap in popular games offered for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, with first-person shooters comprising the majority of preferred titles.
• Nintendo Wii fans are much more nostalgic than their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 counterparts, which is reflected in their game choices.

Leisure Activities

• All console fans enjoy group activities such as poker or football with greater frequency than the overall Hunch community.
• Wii fans are less avid in their video game consumption than their Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 counterparts.

Community

• Wii fans tend to be more solitary in their work, and consider work to be a part of their identity.
• While Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 fans enjoy group work, they tend to be less politically active.
• Xbox 360 fans are less concerned with physical interpersonal interactions, and will interrupt real world interactions in favor of digital interactions.

Print Media Preferences

• Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 fans are more engaged in sporting culture than Wii fans, as evidenced through their reading preferences.
• Wii fans are more interested in local news and tabloid journalism than other console fans.

…and a sample analysis graph to pique your interest:

Check out the full report in pdf format!

The UN climate change conference in Copenhagen is heading into its last few days, with significant debate continuing between developed and developing nations, and between climate change believers and skeptics.  We thought we’d take a quick look at how Hunch users weigh in on their concerns on this issue.

More than 47,000 Hunch users have answered the Teach Hunch About You question “What do you think about global warming?“  Results were as follows:

Nearly half of Hunch users find global warming extremely concerning

Nearly half of all Hunch users think global warming is a cause of great concern, with another quarter finding it concerning but manageable.  28% find it a “potential issue” or an outright scam.  Let’s take this one step deeper to see how the results vary by where Hunchers live, how old they are, or their political ideology.

By geography

North Americans are the most skeptical group, with the smallest percentage (42%) claiming great concern about global warming, and the highest percentage (13%) considering it an “overblown scam”.  South American Hunchers are the most concerned group, with a full 80% believing that global warming is a “grave” or “serious but manageable” concern.

North Americans are least likely to be extremely concerned; South Americans are most likely to be extremely concerned.

By age

You might think that concern about global warming would increase among younger people.  That’s true to an extent, but not completely.  For Hunchers, concern actually peaks among 35-49 year olds and then falls off among both older and younger people.

Concern about global warming peaks among 35-49 year olds and trails off for older and younger people

By political ideology

You’ll probably find it logical that liberals are more concerned about global warming than conservatives.  But the extent of the difference might surprise you.  Turns out that liberals are nearly 5 times as likely to find global warming a “grave concern”, and conservatives are more than 13 times as likely to find it an “overblown scam”.

A whopping 41% of conservative Hunch users consider global warming an "overblown scam"

Whatever the outcome of this week’s climate change conference, the polarizing differences in opinion about climate change are sure to stir continued heated debate.

Yesterday we sent the inaugural issue of the Hunch email newsletter, which we’ll send from time to time as there is news to share.  In case you missed it, you can also see the newsletter on the site.

We send the newsletter to users with a registered account who have opted in to be kept informed about “Hunch happenings”.  If you’d like to opt-in but aren’t already, just go to the ‘Settings’ area of your profile and make sure the “Hunch happenings” check box is enabled.

We’ve enjoyed analyzing Hunch’s data recently and creating reports which summarize some of the insights we’ve found.  We have a lot more of these planned.

For today, we thought we’d lighten things up a bit and and just have some fun.  We looked at results for a THAY question about “Who’s your favorite Sesame Street Character?” and also checked out the correlations of results in the “Which muppet am I?” topic.  If you haven’t seen them yet, these correlation reports appear on every single result page on Hunch (as long as you’re signed in).   Just mouse over the ‘Actions’ menu to the right of the result name and choose the ‘Correlations‘ menu option.

More than 79,000 Hunch users have answered the following Teach Hunch About You question:

Here’s how things stack up:

Who would have guessed that Cookie Monster would take such a commanding lead, blowing away his next closest rival Oscar the Grouch by a 9 percentage point lead?  (Our counsel to Cookie would be to negotiate hard on his contract renewal next year since apparently he’s carrying the show.)  In fact, judging from the enthusiastic pros/cons for Cookie left by Hunch users, the guy would probably win a seat in congress if he ran in the near future.

We were also surprised that Ernie is favored 2:1 to Bert.  At first we thought it might have something to do with those rumors and innuendos that swirled about Bert’s ‘private life‘ for awhile.  But then we cross-tabbed Bert’s popularity with the minority of Hunch users who are absolutely against gays in the military, and you know what?  They actually like Bert more than Hunchers overall (6% vs. 4%).

As far as how each of the above characters correlates with some other THAYs and results on Hunch, here’s what we learned:

Cookie Monster fans: Have never been on a cruise, tend to believe in life after death, think of themselves as “foodies”, live with one other person in their household, and loved the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

Oscar the Grouch fans: Don’t really think about matching the color of their belt with their shoes, tend to have a very casual, almost student-looking living room, drive a truck/suv, don’t belong to a health club, and don’t make their bed every day.

Grover fans: Would like to live in a modern loft with cement floors, would rather be “obese and wealthy” than “healthy and poor”, have never ridden in a helicopter (but would like to sometime) and like to hike.

Ernie fans: Are concerned with the environment and feel that people often misunderstand them.  They don’t like roller coasters but they do have a CD of a Broadway musical at home.  They also don’t floss their teeth.

Count von Count fans: Believe in legalizing marijuana and enjoy awards shows like the Oscars “once in awhile”, yet care “not in the least” who will play in the next World Cup.  They live with other adults (but not a spouse/partner) and enjoy “bistro-type” french fries.

Snuffleupagus fans: Tended to have a big wheel as a kid.  They often doodle, are nostalgic for the days when they could eat “Cheeze in a can”, and can roll their tongues.  But they tend to have never had a passport.

Big Bird fans: Are concerned about homelessness, perform “very well” on standardized tests and are confident “pushing back on authority” when they think it’s appropriate. They skew female and tend to be musically inclined.

Bert fans: Tend to be “great at catching fly balls”.  They don’t drink margaritas and don’t use videochat, but do favor intellectually challenging jobs.  They buy their books online and tend to be single.

Zoe fans: Skew heavily female.  It’s more natural for them to be “nice” rather than “fair” to others.  They are close to nature and like to be “in tune with those around them”.  They aspire to “give back” in life and like “helping the team succeed”.

Ok, that was fun.  Now we’ll get back to some real work.