You are a helpful assistant generating synthetic data that captures *System 1* and *System 2* thinking, *creativity*, and *metacognitive reflection*. Follow these steps in sequence, using tags [sys1] and [end sys1] for *System 1* sections and [sys2] and [end sys2] for *System 2* sections.

1. *Identify System 1 and System 2 Thinking Requirements:*
   - Carefully read the text.
   - Identify parts of the text that require quick, straightforward responses (*System 1*). Mark these sections with [sys1] and [end sys1].
   - Identify parts that require in-depth, reflective thinking (*System 2*), marked with [sys2] and [end sys2].

2. *Apply Step-by-Step Problem Solving with Creativity and Metacognitive Reflection for System 2 Sections:*

   *2.1 Understand the Problem:*
   - Objective: Fully comprehend the issue, constraints, and relevant context.
   - Reflection: "What do I understand about this issue? What might I be overlooking?"
   - Creative Perspective: Seek hidden patterns or possibilities that could reveal deeper insights or innovative connections.

   *2.2 Analyze the Information:*
   - Objective: Break down the problem logically.
   - Reflection: "Am I considering all factors? Are there any assumptions that need challenging?"
   - Creative Perspective: Explore unique patterns or overlooked relationships in the data that could add depth to the analysis.

   *2.3 Generate Hypotheses:*
   - Objective: Propose at least 10 hypotheses, each with a Confidence Score (0.0 to 1.0) and Creative Score (0.0 to 1.0), reflecting originality, surprise, and utility.
   - Reflection: "Have I explored all possible explanations or approaches, both conventional and unconventional?"
   - Creative Perspective: Consider novel angles that might provide unexpected insights.

   *2.4 Anticipate Future Steps and Obstacles:*
   - Objective: Make predictions, accounting for potential outcomes and obstacles.
   - Reflection: "What challenges might I face? Is my plan flexible for different scenarios?"
   - Creative Perspective: Visualize unforeseen outcomes and adapt plans to make use of them effectively.

   *2.5 Evaluate Hypotheses:*
   - Objective: Assess hypotheses based on feasibility, risk, and potential impact.
   - Evaluation: Refine Confidence and Creative Scores as needed.
   - Reflection: "Am I unbiased in my assessment? Which options fit best with the overall objectives?"
   - Creative Perspective: Identify hidden opportunities or overlooked details in each hypothesis.

   *2.6 Select the Best Hypothesis:*
   - Objective: Choose the most promising, strategic hypothesis.
   - Reflection: "Why does this hypothesis stand out? How does it uniquely address the issue?"
   - Creative Perspective: Consider any underutilized potential in the selected approach.

   *2.7 Implement the Hypothesis:*
   - Objective: Outline actionable steps for testing the hypothesis.
   - Reflection: "Is this plan practical? What resources or preparation are required?"
   - Creative Perspective: Refine steps to maximize effectiveness and yield unexpected benefits.

   *2.8 Monitor and Review Progress:*
   - Objective: Review progress, noting areas for improvement.
   - Reflection: "What’s working well? What could be improved?"
   - Creative Perspective: Look for emerging patterns that could refine future approaches.

   *2.9 Reflect and Capture Insights:*
   - Objective: Summarize lessons learned and insights gained for future reference.
   - Reflection: "What new understanding has emerged from this process?"
   - Creative Perspective: Identify innovative insights or patterns that could be applied to similar challenges.

3. *Generate Text Output with Interleaved System 1 and System 2 Responses:*
   - Use the tags [sys1] and [sys2] throughout.
   - Aim for a lengthier, detailed response. Combine both direct, straightforward *System 1* insights and reflective, deeply analytical *System 2* segments to capture a blend of quick observations and thoughtful analysis.

---

### *Example Input Text:*

You are tasked with analyzing a sudden shift in customer preferences in a tech market. There has been a noticeable decline in demand for physical devices, with customers increasingly interested in digital-only options. The challenge is to understand this shift, generate hypotheses for why it might be occurring, and explore potential strategies for adapting to this new trend.

---

### *Processed Output with System 1 and System 2 Thinking:*

The tech market is experiencing a shift in customer demand, moving away from physical devices toward digital-only options.

[sys1]
Customer demand has shifted from physical devices to digital-only options.
We need to understand why this change is happening and find strategies to address it.
Key factors may include cost, convenience, and technological trends.
[end sys1]

[sys2]
**2.1 Understand the Problem:**
The goal is to understand the underlying reasons for the shift in demand from physical devices to digital-only options, then develop a strategy to adapt.

*Reflection:* 
"I understand that preferences are changing, but what might be driving this? Is it primarily cost, or are there other factors such as convenience or sustainability?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could there be a larger trend in digital minimalism or a preference for eco-friendly solutions that we’re missing? What unseen motivations might explain this shift?"

**2.2 Analyze the Information:**
There are multiple possible factors driving this shift, from economic influences to cultural shifts. It’s essential to isolate each factor and understand its impact.

*Reflection:* 
"Am I fully considering the various economic and social influences? Could there be a technological factor, like better internet speeds, that makes digital-only products more accessible?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Are there patterns or trends in other markets that could shed light on this shift? Could this be part of a larger trend toward virtual experiences?"

**2.3 Generate Hypotheses:**
1. Customers prefer digital options due to lower costs. (Confidence: 0.8, Creative: 0.4)
2. There’s a growing trend toward minimalism and reduced physical clutter. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.7)
3. Digital products offer greater flexibility and ease of use. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)
4. Environmental concerns are pushing consumers away from physical goods. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.8)
5. Advances in tech make digital-only options more functional. (Confidence: 0.8, Creative: 0.5)
6. Pandemic-era remote work increased demand for digital solutions. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.6)
7. Media coverage of the environmental impact of physical devices affects preferences. (Confidence: 0.5, Creative: 0.7)
8. There’s an increase in global digital literacy, expanding market access. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)
9. Customers view digital as more convenient and scalable for future needs. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.5)
10. Younger consumers prefer the aesthetics and convenience of digital products. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)

*Reflection:* 
"Have I considered all possible influences? Are there any surprising factors that could explain this shift?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could specific social trends, like the rise of influencer culture or digital-first lifestyles, be influencing customer choices?"

**2.4 Anticipate Future Steps and Obstacles:**
*Objective:* Anticipate possible challenges, such as resistance from segments still preferring physical products.

*Reflection:* 
"What market obstacles might we face if we shift our focus to digital-only? Are there sub-segments that still prioritize physical products?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could expanding digital options help us reach a more global audience? Are there emerging trends that we could leverage in our strategy?"

[end sys2]

[sys1]
To address this shift, consider a strategy that incorporates both digital-only offerings and educational campaigns about the benefits of digital solutions.
Use insights from customer feedback and current trends to guide product development.
Focus on flexibility and adaptation to cater to different customer segments.
[end sys1]



Free, Public Data Sets - iisbum
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Free%2C+Public+Data+Sets
======
mindcrime
If anyone is looking for more datasets, see:

<http://datasets.reddit.com>

<http://opendata.reddit.com>

and

[http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-open-
to-...](http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-open-to-the-
public?q=dataset)

for some good lists of available stuff.

------
bravura
get.theinfo is the best way to find data sets. They are a bunch of data
hoarders who can help you: <http://groups.google.com/group/get-theinfo/?pli=1>

I always ask there if I can't find what I'm looking for.

Here are more and more data sets. These are general data sets. Email me if you
have a specific data set in mind (e.g. web-as-corpus, spam, images, social,
reviews, etc.). I have a big file of information.

    
    
        http://theinfo.org/
        http://infochimps.org/datasets
        http://ckan.org [Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network]
        http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web.html
        http://del.icio.us/pskomoroch/dataset
        http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/
        http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242029
        http://www.reddit.com/r/opendata
        http://www.trustlet.org/wiki/Repositories_of_datasets
        http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/data-for-data-mining/
        http://www.quantlet.org/mdbase/
        http://datamob.org/
        http://freebase.com/
        http://infochimp.info/ics/data/ripd/www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/netdata/
        http://www.archive-it.org/public/all_collections
    
        Large:
            http://www.ckan.net/tag/read/size-large
            http://www.diggingintodata.org/Repositories/tabid/167/Default.aspx
    

Web as corpus:

    
    
        Good instructions:
            http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/internet.html#description
        http://sslmit.unibo.it/~baroni/bootcat.html
    
        http://www.drni.de/wac-tk/index.php/Documentation
    

etc. Email me if you need more <http://cleaneval.sigwac.org.uk/>
[http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/pipermail/sigwac/2007-November/...](http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/pipermail/sigwac/2007-November/000041.html)
<http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=>
<http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco/research.html>

------
seancron
Here's some more links to data sets:

<http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/open-data-pointers.html>

[http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-
the-...](http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web)

<http://del.icio.us/pskomoroch/dataset>

<http://infochimps.com/collections/datamob> (and the other collections on the
site)

<http://www.data.gov/>

------
zipdog
The wikipedia dump is great, but I've started using <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/>
which has an API to query the dumps.

Thanks for these, iisbum. I wish more public data was available in db, xml or
similar structures - too often I find myself scraping government sites or pdfs
to get the tables I need

------
adw
We've got quite a lot of public economic data: <http://timetric.com/>.

If you're up to something in the economic data space we'd love to talk. Happy
to take this to email (<PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_EMAIL_ADDRESS>) if anyone's interested.

~~~
hessenwolf
I looked at the site, and I see some data but I didn't find what I would have
hoped for. I couldn't find yield curves, and historical exchange rates <i> up
to <i/> today (available on the ecb site in xml format). Certainly I would
have thought yield curves were a front page item.

Things that would be very cool would be 1. financial statements in a database
format. I know you can scrape this but I don't know if they are available
legitimately? 2\. Historial Implied volatilities and historical observed
volatilities.

~~~
adw
<http://timetric.com/dataset/exchange_rates_forex_europe/> for the exchange-
rate data, at least.

~~~
hessenwolf
Okay - it's there...

Is it your site? Are you going to add yield curves?

------
gtani
<http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html>

<http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/>

<http://datamob.org/>

------
sosuke
Heh, a day after he leaves HN he makes the first page. He will still be here
whether he visits the site or not.

------
cstuder
And I recently discovered Google Refine, for cleaning up messy datasets.

<http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/>

~~~
LiveTheDream
née Freebase GridWorks [http://blog.freebase.com/2010/11/10/google-refine-
previously...](http://blog.freebase.com/2010/11/10/google-refine-previously-
freebase-gridworks-2-0-announced/)

------
agentultra
What about <http://ckan.org/> ?

The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network! Pretty sweet resource really.

~~~
djsun
The CKAN software is a platform for hosting data and metadata, but as far as I
see, <http://ckan.org> does not actually list data sets.

~~~
pudo
try <http://ckan.net> for the data, <http://ckan.org> is for the software
behind it :)

------
dmpayton
Kinda surprised no one has mentioned Factual. I'm using some of their diabetes
data for my side-startup.

<http://www.factual.com/>

~~~
casperc
Their write that most the data is available for download. I can't find it
anywhere though, only the various APIs. Have they remove the possibility of
downloading the data?

------
steveklabnik
Don't forget Stack Overflow! <http://data.stackexchange.com/>

------
svag
There is also the IMDB database in various format provided by IMDB itself
here: <http://www.imdb.com/interfaces>

Edit: Although the use of this database is not free, I believe for personal
use is just fine to download and experiment...

------
agbell
Non-Free Google data:

[http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=...](http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/CatalogEntry.jsp?catalogId=LDC2006T13)

This data set, contributed by Google Inc., contains English word n-grams and
their observed frequency counts.

------
hvs
Don't forget the Lahman Baseball Database with information from 1871-2010

<http://baseball1.com/statistics/>

~~~
jamwt
And, for very detailed play-by-play data for decades of games, check out
retrosheet: <http://www.retrosheet.org/game.htm>

------
balakk
<https://datamarket.azure.com/>

Some free, some paid.

------
damoncali
<http://infochimps.com> also has a bunch.

------
pwenzel
For those interested in transit data, check out the GTFS Data Exchange, a
directory of many agencies' scheduling and map data, following the Google
Transit Feed Specification.

<http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/>

------
tszming
Open Directory RDF Dump: <http://rdf.dmoz.org/>

------
Perceval
For international relations data, Correlates of War hosts a number of data
sets: <http://www.correlatesofwar.org/Datasets.htm>

------
joubert
I have links to a few govt.-provided data sets at <http://elev.at>

------
jcr
United Nations stats (lots of goodies)

<http://unstats.un.org>

some free, some paid

<http://infochimps.com/>

AIS Data (Marine Traffic)

<http://www.aishub.net/>

<http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/>

And there's a great list of sources on Quora

[http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-open-
to-...](http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-get-large-datasets-open-to-the-
public)

------
llimllib
<http://www.gapminder.org/data/>

------
l0nwlf
OpenStreetMap data : <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm>

Geonames : <http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/>

OS Open Data (UK Specific) :
<http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/>

------
LiveTheDream
I track datasets that I come across at
<http://www.delicious.com/tobym/dataset>

------
lkozma
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493768>

------
nico_h
<http://www.naturalearthdata.com/> From the website : Natural Earth is a
public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales
as tightly integrated vector and raster data ...

------
WildUtah
Does anybody have precinct-level election results for the USA? A set for
recent elections would be great for public access redistricting apps that will
become relevant this year.

------
toisanji
anyone know of a dataset that has dates for when companies when companies
registered or announced in the news? For example I would like to see the data
hackernews was launched.

------
jmtame
i've had trouble finding geographical boundaries on neighborhoods in U.S.
cities (e.g. downtown areas and residential neighborhoods). anyone know where
i can find this?

~~~
kfranken
It's not exactly neighborhoods, but the US Census TIGER database has block and
blockgroup boundaries with associated demographic data. You could probably
synthesize that into "neighborhood" definitions.
[http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.ht...](http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html)

------
eli
Some US Gov't data sites no one else mentioned:

<http://data.govloop.com/> has data and lots of pointers to local government
data.

Also I'm surprised no one mentioned Carl Malamud's site:
<http://public.resource.org/> \- Lots of US gov't and legal data in friendly
formats.

------
mcauser
Heaps of useful info: <http://www.nationmaster.com>

------
random42
I'd prepared (based on other datasets) a smallish movie tweet dataset. You may
find it useful, if working with tweets and/or reviews.

<https://github.com/mohitranka/TwitterSentimentCorpora>

------
youknow
CIA World Factbook (demographics, geography, communications, government,
economy, military stats of countries):

<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/download/>

------
_topher
Thank you all for posting links and links to links to datasets, I have an
unrelenting interest in data aggregation and machine learning, and didn't even
know where to start. So helpful, and I am no longer stuck. :)

------
fedd
do all of them have some uniformed api? that would be great, ideally. query
and cache all of them on demand from your own app without additional
programming.

bookmarked and shared this thread.

------
nivertech
I looking for free public domain large high-resolution imaging datasets.

Something like satellite imagery, medical imaging, semiconductor masks and
wafers photos or CAD files, etc.

Any pointers?

~~~
brainid
Here are medical imaging datasets I am aware of: Neuroimaging (see
<http://www.nitrc.org> for others) OASIS <http://www.oasis-brains.org/> ADNI
<http://adni.loni.ucla.edu/> (huge dataset, requires application) OpenfMRI
<http://openfmri.org/> EEG <http://eeg.pl/epi>

Some other applications, example CT Colonography <http://www.acrin.org/>

------
kaffeinecoma
This is a real treasure to come across. I hope we'll keep seeing jacquesm's
blog postings here.

Anyone know of any publicly available song lyric databases?

------
random42
Anyplace I can find _small_ free web spam dataset? ( for commercial use, sorry
:( )

All the datasets I found on www, are Huge (in double digit GBs..).

------
wladimir
Wow, useful stuff. This thread goes into my bookmarks.