I have to post this paper for my math class because I forgot my disk and it will be the easyist way for me to get to it later.

What is data? That’s a question that was posed to me today by my teacher D. And here now is my attempt at answering her question.
According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) data consist of, among other things, 22,000 agent and contact listings. At this website you can find anything and everything you’ve ever wanted to know about movies. All the statistics. Like, how many films has Tom Hanks made? Or what film won the most Oscars in 1995? Or what’s in theaters right now? But that can’t be all that data is, can it? So what else is it?
According to the US Census Bureau Home Page data is that information that you filled out on those surveys you took three years ago. Remember toughs? It’s the age, race, gender, income level and more on every US citizen. According to the US Census Bureau, that’s what data is. But what else is it?
Next there’s Social Science Data California (SSDC) where they claim that you can “search or browse our listing of 748 Internet sites of numeric Social Science statistical data, data catalogs, data libraries, social science gateways, addresses and more.” So, what does that mean? What does that tell us about data? Well, looking further into the website I found that what they consider to be data is numbers. Different information represented in numbers.
The next website I’ve come across is the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). On this website, they stock pile information about weather. Think about it like “The Weather Channel” only on the web and you can watch “re-runs” whenever you want to. Their idea of data is anything and everything that has to do with weather. From El Nina to Hurricane Andrew you’ll probably find it here.
Now here’s an odd one I found: The Protein Data Bank. Instead of trying (in vain I’m sure) to explain to you what they do, I’ll just quote them: “Welcome to the PDB, the single worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of 3-D biological macromolecular structure data.” Whatever they do, it does sound very important.
So, in conclusion, data is many different things to many different people. And I’m sure I only hit the tip of the ice burg.



http://www.imdb.com
http://www.census.gov
http://odwin.uscd.edu/idata/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html
http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/