We've long been intrigued with Benford's Law and its potential for Analytic Journalism.  Today we ran across a new post by Charley Kyd that explains both the Law and presents some clear formulas for its application.

An Excel 97-2003 Tutorial:

Use Benford's Law with Excel
To Improve Business Planning

Benford's Law addresses an amazing characteristic of data. Not only does his formula help to identify fraud, it could help you to improve your budgets and forecasts.

by Charley Kyd
July, 2007
(Email Comments)

(Follow this link for the Excel 2007 version.)

Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.

Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.

This article will explain Benford's Law, show you how to calculate it with Excel, and suggest ways that you could put it to good use.

From a hands-on-Excel point of view, the article describes new uses for the SUMPRODUCT function and discusses the use of local and global range names.  [Read more...]

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Assoc. Prof. Paul M. Torrens, at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences (torrens at geosimulation dot com) continues to turn out interesting simulation models. Most recently they are about crowd movement, but the methods are applicable to many venues. See his work at Geosimulation.org    

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Yet another interesting innovation of mapping.  Imagine what this might mean for analysis of tourism sites or crowd control?
From O'Reilly Radar (http://radar.oreilly.com/)

 

Bio Mapping Project in Stockport This Weekend

Posted: 20 Jul 2007 01:04 PM CDT

By Brady Forrest

The Bio Mapping project sponsors people to walk around an area with a GPS and a Galvanic Skin Response sensor and logger. The emotional responses of the participants are then mapped. The map of San Francisco (pdf) was recently completely. They had previously developed a beautiful map of Greenwich (viewable via Flash viewer or Google Earth).

The project has been run by Christian Nold for several years now. Here's how he describes the project in an interview:

You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain?
Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated.

How?
By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation.

This weekend they are biomapping Stockport. If you happen to be in the UK you can participate -- I know that I would. I would love to set this up at one of our conferences to watch the emotional response of attendees throughout the day and at different sessions. Did the keynote speaker or product launch really get people excited? What about that debate?

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Our long-time friend Marylaine Block has again served up some good librarian-centric material on her blog/newsletter "Neat New Stuff" and "Exlibrius". This time it's a fine essay -- with links to pertinent sites -- on one of our favorite topics, visualization. Here's the top, but go to ExLibris #301 Archive: for the complete package.

VISUALIZING INFORMATION by Marylaine Block

On several occasions librarians have asked me to speak about the future of reference service - if, indeed, there IS a future for reference service. I think librarians are worried that the simple delivery of information is not a growth area for libraries because that's where our primary competitor, the internet, excels, with its search engines and resources like Wikipedia. Helping people make sense of the information they've retrieved is something else again, and that, I believe, is where the future of reference service lies. After all, who is dying to compete with librarians in explaining to people how to fill out online FAFSA and FEMA applications? Who is fighting librarians for the opportunity to show people how to select, combine, and chart a variety of data points in government data sets? Who else wants to help students analyze and retrieve the kinds of information needed to solve a problem or research a topic? Who else worries about making sure the information retrieved matches the user's purposes and level of knowledge and sophistication? Who else is interested in providing context for the information? One of the most effective tools we can use to help people make sense of information is visualization.

An interesting conference just completed in the UK.  Be sure to scroll down to listen to the presentations and, in some cases, see the slides.  Go to  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/State_of_the_map

The State Of The Map

From OpenStreetMap

The State Of The Map is the name of our OpenStreetMap conference(s). However, as there has only been one so far, all the information below refers to the State of the Map conference in 2007, held at the University of Manchester, UK.

OpenStreetMap's first conference was at the centre of the geographical industry universe on the weekend of 14/15 July 2007, supported by Manchester University's School of Environment and Development.

• 1 What happened?
  • 1.1 Talks & Panel debates
• 2 Who Attended?
• 3 Location

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FYI: From the O'Reilly Radar

"Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics Posted: 11 Jul 2007 03:01 AM CDT By Jesse Robbins I presented last week at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul along with Professor Hans Rosling, Mike Arrington, John Gage and teams from MappingWorlds, Swivel (disclosure: I am an adviser to Swivel) and Many Eyes. We were the "Web2.0 Delegation" and it was an incredible experience. The Istanbul Declaration signed at the conference calls for governments to make their statistical data freely available online as a "public good." The declaration also calls for new measures of happiness and well-being, going ...   more »