Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy speculated that when parents chose a name for a child, they were influenced by their interactions with other new parents, so the spread of the names the babies were given was a proxy for the pattern of those interactions.

ECONOMIST: Babies' names and the internet

Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, the best proxy for Muslim voters, seem to have followed that pattern.

ECONOMIST: The hunt for an elusive group of by-election voters

The pattern in this light acts as a kind of proxy for the history of star formation, and therefore a history of structure in the cosmos.

BBC: Science & Environment