OECD eXplorer on the BBC News

NCVA’s OECD eXplorer on the BBC News (direct link to NEWS SITE for National Center for Visual Analytics, NCVA, at the University of Linköping, Sweden)

OECD eXplorer on BBC News

On July 2nd BBC News showed a 3 minutes long program demonstrating OECD eXplorer in live action to explore and visualize complex regional statistical world data – a geovisual analytics technique developed by NCVA.

Direct link to the video http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8129512.stm and to the BBC site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8130554.stm, where also Gapminder is pointed out.

See also links to all eXplorer applications here including the new ones for Eurostat and Statistics Sweden.

The Semantic Web Gang

The Semantic Web Gang is a monthly round-table podcast bringing together a regular panel of commentators on the Semantic Web.

Some examples:

May 2009: The Semantic Web Gang discuss Wolfram Alpha and Google’s RDFa

April 2009: The Semantic Web Gang discuss vocabularies and ontologies

July 2008: The Semantic Web Gang discusses interfaces to the Semantic Web

SemanticGang

Blog about Stats on twitter

Microblogging (like twitter) provides short messages of a person or institution.

Blog about Stats uses twitter as complementary tool, providing hints and links on what’s new, interesting, strange in the field of  disseminating statistics: This is ‘Blog Stats’ Hints‘. It’s also possible to follow the microblogs of other people and institutions.

The newest short messages are shown in the left margin of this blog under the titel ‘Blog Stats’ Hints’.

20 Visualizations to Understand Crime

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finger

20 Visualizations to Understand Crime

POSTED BY NATHAN / JUN 23, 2009

There’s a lot of crime data. For almost every reported crime, there’s a paper or digital record of it somewhere, which means hundreds of thousands of data points – number of thefts, break-ins, assaults, and homicides as well as where and when the incidents occurred.

With all this data it’s no surprise that the NYPD (and more recently, the LAPD) took a liking to COMPSTAT, an accountability management system driven by data.

While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people’s privacy, there’s still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.

Read on and have a look at all the visualizations …..

How Twitter can make history by Clay Shirky

About this talk

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

About Clay Shirky

Shirky, a prescient voice on the Internet’s effects, argues that emerging technologies enabling loose collaboration will change the way our society works.

Full bio and more links

“Hooray! The Second Derivative of the Unemployment Rate Improved!”

Nate Silver,  statistician,  is ranked to be among the 100 most influential persons in the world by Times.

He has a blog at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ which is based very much on information search and statistics not only in U.S. but also in other countries. This is an example from U.S. with focus on the economic recession:538-nw

5.08.2009

Hooray! The Second Derivative of the Unemployment Rate Improved!

by Nate Silver @ 12:12 PM

A lot of people are excited today not because the unemployment rate is low (it’s very high — 8.9 percent), nor because the economy is adding jobs (it lost another 539,000 last month, according to statistics just released by the BLS), but merely because it’s losing jobs less quickly. That is, the second derivative of the employment rate — the change in the rate of change — has improved. This is what the situation looks like:

The economy started losing jobs in January, 2008 and has continued to lose them ever since. The peak month for job losses — so far — was January 2009, in which 741,000 jobs were lost. The month at which the second derivative bottomed out — the time when the rate of job losses was increasing the fastest — came in November.

The $787 billion question, of course, is whether a decrease in the rate of job losses indeed portends a recovery, or whether such data is subject to false starts. Let’s take a somewhat high-level view of the progress of the employment situation over the previous five recessions.

More…..

Helping free up government data

Some weeks ago Tim Berners Lee’s message at TED was:  Raw Data Now! .
Now Gordon Brown charged him with helping free up government data for all to use.

In a telephone interview with Rory Cellan-Jones,BBC technology correspondent ‘he was adamant that this was not some party political job, but part of a grand global missio’. Listen to the interview

Tim Berners-Lee


UK goes the same direction as the Obama administration which intends to give more transparency, especially on everything related to the money trail and will use a bundle of semantic tools to do so.

See also

“Watch Out, Oracle: Google Tests Cloud-based Database”

troogle-logo-kleinste

This is quite an interesting article from Troogle, relating to Google Fusion Tables in my previous input and also trying to sort out the truth about Google´s intentions in the database field.

TroogleWatch Out, Oracle: Google Tests Cloud-based Database

Posted in NewsPublicationsWeb by henrydewaag on June 12, 2009

Google has released an early version of a new type of database whose approach to data management will be revolutionary, according to an analyst who has studied the technology behind it.

On Tuesday, Google quietly announced in its research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases.

Specifically, Fusion Tables has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogenous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google.

More….

Google Fusion Tables

gfu

Examples of Data Visualization

On webdesignerdepot 50 examples of data visualisation are shown. The focus lies on visualising the activities found while exploring the Web. Webdesignerdepot lists 50 of the best data visualizations, ‘covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter’ .

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization | Webdesigner Depot

Some beautiful apps:

Stack shows which sites people digg in realtime

Web Trend Map is a very popular overview of important Web domains projected onto the Tokyo underground network.

WebTrendMap4

No statistical website on this network. But here a pinch of statistics  …. CIA Factbook visualization …. albeit not very convincing.

Statistics Sweden (SCB) on Twitter

Since a couple of weeks Statistics Sweden is using Twitter for communicating statistics.  This is how it looks.  Sofar only the Swedish press releases are included.
twitter

3 years

Blog about Stats started three years ago.

Total views: 42,059, 166 posts, one per week.

blogstat-stats-3years

Thanks for having contributed to the development of this blog!

Stats after two years

Gapminder on the Diversity of Africa

Another TED video of Hans Rosling presenting data with Gapminder. This time on The Truth About HIV, in which we learn a lot about the diversity of Africa. This is where the trendalyzer shines.

And albeit the severe topic I also wanted to bring your attention to a detail of his presentation technique. Hans Rosling uses an old-style pointer instead of the laser ones we see so very often these days and his presentation makes it very clear why that is a better choice.

Hans Rosling presents using old-style pointer

You might want to subscribe to the TED videos as a podcast on iTunes. On the web however you will be able to get to the translations, e.g. the video mentioned here is already available with french and swedish subtitles.

Showing off your data on the go

Ok, you’ve seen animated population pyramids before, but it happens to the best of us that they don’t work in a certain environment. Like I had to witness during a recent conference, someone clicks a link and nothing happens: wrong browser, missing plugin, content/security restrictions. All you get is a blank window.

While many of us will have their prepared laptop with them on conferences, there are lots of occasions where booting up even a smaller laptop doesn’t fit. Now what if you could show your data during every conversation and it just worked? Lucky enough who has an iPhone or iPod touch (OS 2.1 from August 2008 or newer). Have a look:

And check it out right here for yourself (works with Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.5+):

Animated Population Pyramid (Germany 1950-2050) – iPhone edition

Depending on the language of your browser this visualisation will be localized to either english, french, german, spanish or russian (meta-data is available in english/german only).

Don’t mistake this for a gadget ad. A lot of our products need quite some explanation, they need someone who puts them into context and this could perfectly happen during so many face to face conversations we have. And while we put most of our efforts online these days, in a personal conversation usually a leaflet or booklet has worked better so far. But this changes.

You might argue that mobile phones just become as powerful as ordinary computers and so will play all our web content including animations (like the iPhone already does), but with this example I wanted to show how one could adapt – with just a few hours work – interactive graphics for those smaller devices.

Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care

From ReadWriteWeb:

Written by Richard MacManus / May 18, 2009 3:15 AM

linkeddata_bloomLast week we discussed how the current era of the Web is evolving. One of the concepts we noted was Linked Data, an idea whose time has come in 2009. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We’ve gone from a Web of documents, via the WWW, to a Web of data. Berners-Lee is now on a crusade for everyone from government departments to individuals to open up their data and put it on the Web – so that others can link to it and use it. In this post we give a high level overview of Linked Data. Read on to stop and smell the roses.

Read more….

Wolfram Alpha is online

Some hours ago the much discussed new search engine Wofram Alpha (see blogstats post ) went online.

wolfram-intro

It gives results about statistics (first page only viewed below)

wolfram-gdp

And it gives ample information about 2 slices of swiss cheese (plain, low fat etc.) ;)

wolfram-swiss-cheese

It gives ample source information:

wolfram-sources

And it gives this, too:

wolfram-overload

Go to live video

Reality Checks

From June 18th to 20th 2009 Data Designed for Decisions DD4D a joint IIID and OECD conference, will take place in Paris.

What’s about? 
‘Bringing personal meaning and relevance to statistics. Sharing tools to access and understand data. Finding stories in data and communicating them. Helping people understand complex issues. Graphic representation and decision-making. Visualising progress and development.’

Important and often discussed topics in the field of official statistics! 

More about the programme, speakers and topics

An innovative project in parallel to the DD4D conference is called Reality Checks:

2009-05-15_223302

‘Placed at local community level Reality Check projects will observe the use, visualisation, communication and understanding of data in a particular context. The resulting case studies will provide a crosssection of solutions for data access, communication and visualisation around the world. …. ‘ People around the world can participate in gathering information on how we communicate, visualise and understand data in various contexts’. 

The case studies will be presented in the 3rd OECD Forum in Busan, Korea on 27–30 October 2009.

3rd OECD World Forum on “Charting
Progress, Building Visions, Improving Life” to be held in Busan, Korea on 27–30 October

Quick guide from Gapminder to the Motion Chart Gadget

Motion Chart is a free gadget in Google Spreadsheet (an online spreadsheet similar to excel). In motion chart you can convert your data-series into a Gapminder-like graph and put it on your web-page or blog. All you need is a free Google-account.

Read more including comments…

“Depth Reporting”

From MARK SCHAVER, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, UNITED STATES,  The Courier-Journal’s computer-assisted reporting director:
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Interactive public data from Google

image

You can now type “unemployment rate Kentucky” or “population indiana” in the Google search box and get an interactive chart that allows you to do comparisons with other states. Says Google:

… we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction. We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it’s used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations.

TechCrunch suggests it was deliberately intended to steal the thunder of a soon-to-be-launched search engine from the maker of Mathematica. See also: Wolfram Alpha in blogstats

It also can’t be good news for Many EyesSwivel or Data360.

Real-time Stats

Sprint’s network visualises stats in an entertaining manner.

As a dashboard

dashboard-sprint-big

or with videos

Don’t get lost!