Anytime we travel through the Internet we leave piles of data behind us, like Pigpen shedding his cloud of filth. It's too bad if you're concerned about privacy. But if you're a mathematician, that heap of dirt is more like a goldmine, and digging into it can turn up unexpected nuggets. A study of worldwide Google searches, for one thing, reveals that people in wealthier nations think less about the past.
Google collects data on what search terms people around the world are using. Researchers who want to use this data to compare search terms across different countries are usually restricted to places that share a language. But the authors of a new paper in Scientific Reports got around that problem by looking only at numerical search terms.
"We realized...that years represented in Arabic numerals are an almost universal written representation," author
Helen Susannah Moat wrote in an email. By ...
