Logan Symposium: Google Public Data Explorer

http://fora.tv/2010/04/18/Logan_Symposium_Google_Public_Data_Explorer

Talks Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when

Hans Rosling was a young guest student in India when he first realized that Asia had all the capacities to reclaim its place as the world’s dominant economic force. At TEDIndia, he graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html

Datablog – News – guardian.co.uk

• World carbon emissions, by country

  Click on image for big picture Image: World Resources Institute

  Datablog Full figures, for every country in the world

  Continue reading… 3 comments

  Posted by Simon Rogers 15.15 BST

• US emissions, compared to the world’s

  Roll over lines to get the data. How bad are US carbon emissions? These figures give us an indication. Continue reading… 2 comments
  Posted by Simon Rogers 14.40 BST

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog Friday 14 August 2009

“Rosling’s World: The best statistics you’ve ever seen” (from Swedish Television)

Hans Rosling in action. Foto: TED.com

Rosling’s World: The best statistics you’ve ever seen

Hans Rosling is a professor in international health, who has made an unlikely global success. His presentations on global development evokes laughter, rejoice and reflections. People with power, like Al Gore or Bill Clinton, ask for his advice. He wants everyone to question their prejudices about the world – as he himself has needed to do. A documentary by Pär Fjällström, SVT.

Read more…

To build an ecosystem of data on the Web

Using statistical data to explain the world, telling stories with statistical data, visualizing statistical data to make these data accessible in a quick and instructive manner – all these topics are well known and belong to  long and intensive discussions and activities in many institutions of official statistics. Results can be seen on the websites of National Statistical Institutes and international statistical organisations.

Some examples:

OECD explorer

ECB Inflation dashboard

World Bank Atlas

Business Cycle Tracer Statistics Nertherlands

Stat@las Statistics Switzerland

Eurostat TGM

There are many other visualizations and behind all these user friendly databases with free access for everybody. This is the ecosystem of official statistics.

Official satistical data are also used and presented outside the institutions of official statistics (see: earlier post raw data now and helping free up data), the discussions and aims are comparable, the instruments are innovative.

Well known is Gapminder which collects data from many sources and offers a presentation tool that has also been integrated as motion chart in the list of visualization widgets of Google spreadsheets.

Google’s Fusion Tables (see earlier post Fusion Tables and gov.data) provide some more possibilities of data collaboration and data visualization. Listening to Alon Halevy, senior Google engineer and Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute (which uses Fusion Tables) well known arguments can be heard: ‘ “The biggest potential [of Google Fusion Tables] is to build an ecosystem of data on the Web. This means making it easy for the people to upload, to merge data sets, to discuss the data, to create visualizations and then to take these visualizations and put them elsewhere on the Web so that there’s better data on the Web.” ‘

Link: Google Fusion Tables

Is the Economy Getting Ready to Turn Around? (from Flowing Data)

Is the Economy Getting Ready to Turn Around?

Posted by Nathan / Jul 6, 2009 to Economics, Infographics / 2 comments

Is the economy going to turn around any time soon? How does this economic swing compare to previous cycles? Amanda Cox et al of the New York Times explores these ever so important questions in her recent nine-part interactive series.

More……

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)

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.

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.

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.