You Can See in Numbers

‘We are extremely sad to announce that Professor Hans Rosling died this morning. Hans suffered from a pancreatic cancer which was diagnosed one year ago. He passed away early Tuesday morning, February 7, 2017, surrounded by his family in Uppsala, Sweden.’ Anna R. Rönnlund & Ola Rosling, Co-founders of Gapminder. He died aged 68.

Hans Rosling, preparing his presentation in Geneva, 2009-10-30              Photo: A. Grossenbacher

In 2009, the Swiss Statistics’ Meeting took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Hans Rosling was there and his talk’s topic: ‘Unveiling the beauty of statistics’. He wanted data to be free, free from legal and technical barriers. His ambition – and his success – was to disseminate these data beautifully … in order to change the world.

A difficult task. In an interview in the Guardian, in 2013: “It’s that I became so famous with so little impact on knowledge,” he says, when asked what’s surprised him most about the reaction he’s received. “Fame is easy to acquire, impact is much more difficult. …. He’s similarly nonplussed about being a data guru. “I don’t like it. My interest is not data, it’s the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers.”  (Taken from the Guardian interview 2013).

And that’s why statistics and the world need more people like Hans Rosling – more than ever!

AoS: The new Atlas of Switzerland … and more

On June 20th, 2016 the moment arrived to unveil the new Atlas of Switzerland (AoS):

Simone Niggli-Luder (orienteering athlete and multiple world champion), Sarah Springman (Rector of the ETH Zurich), Marc Chardonnens (Director of the Federal Office for the Environment). (Foto AG)

AoS Version 4

The new Atlas of Switzerland AoS is (since 2000) already version 4.

“The AoS is mandated by law by the Swiss Federation to visualize themes from different fields such as socio-economy, ecology, history and energy, etc. in an ongoing long-term project. Since its beginning in 1961, the aim of this Swiss national atlas is to offer cartographically sound maps in combination with additional information to the general public in order to visualize visible and hidden structures and processes.” (Source: Atlas of Switzerland goes online and 3D – Concept, Architecture and Visualization. Methods. René Sieber, Marianna Serebryakova, Raimund Schnürer, Lorenz Hurni. EuroCarto 2015)

Version 4 is a step forward. It
– is based on a platform open for third parties’ products,
– is available online and
– presents information on a globe model and in 3D.

Platform

The AtlasPlatformSwitzerland (APS) is the architectural framework for future AoS products. It also offers the possibility to publish affiliated atlases from other institutions; one example is the Hydrological Atlas of the University of Bern.

Online

After downloading the client software (for te moment Windows only), thematic maps can be selected from the online archive and viewed.
Besides the navigation in the Atlas itself an easy access to these maps is also given on AoS’ Website:

Presentation

And here comes the fascinating part of the new Atlas: The presentation based on an earth model and also in 3D.

“The core of this APS – the so-called APSglobe – consists of a 3D virtual globe (osgEarth) with basic tools for navigation, visualization, and querying.” (http://www.atlasderschweiz.ch/portfolio/).

A globalized example shows the flights from Zurich in 3D:

 

Another map presents population density in two and three-dimensional views:

.

 

Drilldowns show settlement structures  (here the train station Bern) with the possibility of navigating through cities and of changing perspectives:

Hydrological Atlas

On the same Atlas Platform, the University of Bern publishes its Hydrological Atlas of Switzerland using all the possibilities of navigating and presentation.

.

More maps: Statistical Atlas of Switzerland

There’s another Atlas with hundreds of thematic maps based on statistics:

More about Statatlas in the –> Leporello

 

 

Blog about Stats 2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

It’s high time to demystify

Data, Big Data, Data Scientist, Data Mining …. Statistics. And next: Linked Open Data?

Look at this semantically rich clearing process by Diego Kuonen. It’s worth while!

 

A Statistician's View on Big Data and Data Science (Version 2) from Prof. Dr. Diego Kuonen

 

See also: https://blogstats.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/big-data-open-data-and-official-statistics/

Envy the Data Visualisation Centre? Not any more.

If you follow the ONS Data Visualisation Centre you will be amazed by the fireworks of interactive graphics that they regularly produce. At least I am. Here are just a few recent examples that caught my eye.

  

Now who wouldn’t want to install a similar group in their organisation. Apart from the management task at hand (including fighting against or around an established CMS in most cases) people often ask where and how they can get their staff and colleagues up to speed with all the current technology, what are the tools, how do they work and what media partners could be interested in possible collaboration or syndication.

Luckily there are conferences for that and in 2014 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will be hosting such an event in England that will answer most of those questions. It is the well known Graphical Web Conference and takes place in this top notch venue in Winchester from August 27–30th, 2014. The theme will be “visual storytelling”.

The Graphical Web focus is on open web technologies such as SVG, CSS, Canvas, WebGL and the respective JavaScript libraries that make dealing with these graphic formats a lot easier. Front and center being D3 the data driven documents library that has become a de-facto standard in the data-visualisation world.

Have a look at the conference website and follow @TheGraphicalWeb on Twitter for the latest updates.

Exoplanet Statistics

There are very special statistics where the survey instrument is a telescope and the data are far from our world.

WORLDS

There’s a fascinating animated visualisation of this survey –  and an award winning one: WORLDS. The Kepler Planet Candidates.

.

‘CinéGlobe yesterday (19th October 2013) awarded the Data Visualization Prize at the Imagine Science Film Festival to the film “Worlds, The Kepler Planet Candidates”, a simple yet stunning depiction of the Kepler search for earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Director Alex Parker creates a subtle visual narrative that leads the viewer to the gradual realization that our earth may be very far from the only living planet in our universe.’

Exoplanets, Kepler’s Candidates?

At first I didn’t understand what’s behind this visualisation:

‘This animation shows the 2299 high-quality (multiple transits), non-circumbinary transiting planet candidates found by NASA’s Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They are drawn to scale with accurate radii (in r / r* ), orbital periods, and orbital distances (in d / r*). They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to -110 C at the coldest – red indicates warmest, and blue / indigo indicates coldest candidates.’ (From CinéGlobe)

But this video made it clear:

.

All Candidates (till now)

And these are all the detected stars (huge ones!) with planets in their orbits. Much more on NASA’s Kepler Homepage

.

Who knows?

Perhaps out there on one of these planets live statisticians. And they are about to visualise how many planets have statisticians visualising data … .

IMAODBC 2013: And the winner is …

The Best-Presentation Award of the International Marketing and Output Database Conference IMAODBC 2013 in Neuchâtel/Switzerland goes to Ilka Willand from the  German Federal Statistical Office destatis.

Ilka presented the reputation analysis 2013 of destatis which aims at getting information about  target groups for statistical information – also the ones not reached (yet).

Target Groups

There’s a new target group approach:

First results (more to come later)

First results of the not yet finished survey show how these groups search statistical information and how they want to access this information (green: preferred behaviour, red: not preferred behaviour).
Interesting: In Germany social media are considered to be for private use only, not for accessing official statistics .. :

.

Here is the full presentation (link)

Hedonometer

I am happy (8.3? from 9) to present you this –> link!

Daily Happiness Averages for Twitter, September 2008 to present

The happiness rank (whatever this is) for ‘happy’: ok!

The happiness rank for ‘sadness’: ok!

And this, the happiness rank for ‘statistics’ …. below the average! Unbelievable 😉

… See also OECD’s Better Life Index

The Graphical Web 2013 Conference

I have long argued for doing data visualizations in-house and even there within the people who know about the subject-matters. Statistical organizations suffer from a lot of friction by outsourcing everything software related and even the arguments with internal IT-departments not always result in timely innovation.

Luckily data visualization on the web has become less than a rocket science and especially the ONS Data Visualisation Center has shown excellent work in this space, that was done in-house by statisticians.

 

Therefore I feel it being appropriate to invite the followers of this blog to The Graphical Web 2013 Conference, which takes place October 21.-23. in San Francisco. The conference may be known to you as SVGopen, which it was called until 2012 but the name-change reflects the wider use of different graphical technologies such as Canvas or WebGL. However they all have in common that they are open standards and don’t require any plugins.

Conference submissions are welcome until June 9th and National Statistical Institutions have certainly a lot of material to showcase in this realm. The conference will give you the opportunity to get in contact with developers from your favorite Library (D3), browser vendors and w3c experts. Also expect a lot of representatives from Adobe to attend.

2013

Happy New Year!Cartoon by nzz.ch, campus, 24.12.2012

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 35,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.