Blogstats: BLOG ABOUT STATS.
All about dissemination of Official Statistics.
The views expressed on this weblog are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of employers.
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)
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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’ .
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.
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.
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.
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+):
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.
Last 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.
From June 18th to 20th 2009 Data Designed for DecisionsDD4D, 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!
An innovative project in parallel to the DD4D conference is called Reality Checks:
‘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
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.
… 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.
Last week we discussed 
