An intriguing op-ed in The Washington Post on Saturday (June 20, 2009) claimed to spot fraud in the Iran elections by applying some analytic methods basically drawn from Benford's Law. Yes, read the article, but be sure to drill down into the 140+ comments. Most quite cogent and well argued.
Since the declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory in Iran's presidential election, accusations of fraud have swelled. Against expectations from pollsters and pundits alike, Ahmadinejad did surprisingly well in urban areas, including Tehran -- where he is thought to be highly unpopu...By Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco
Discovered a new, online resource for teaching spatial thinking today while attending the UCGIS Summer Assembly here in Santa Fe. Take a lookat teachspatial.org:
About TeachSpatial
TeachSpatial.org implements suggestions from a multi-disciplinary Symposium on a Curriculum for Spatial Thinking. The symposium, organized by Diana Sinton, Mike Goodchild, and Don Janelle, was hosted by the University of Redlands in June 2008. Its purpose was to discuss the merits and content of a general curriculum course on spatial thinking. One of its recommendations was to establish a wiki site to promote the discussion and sharing of resources among instructors.
Participants in the Redlands meeting were Kate Beard-Tisdale (Spatial Information Science Engineering, Maine), Marcia Castro (Global Health and Population, Harvard), Jeremy Crampton (Geosciences, Georgia State), Phil Gersmehl, Geography, CUNY Hunter), Mike Goodchild and Don Janelle (spatial@ucsb), John Kantner (School of Advanced Field Studies, Santa Fe), Steve Marshak (Geology, Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jo-Beth Mertens (Economics, Hobart and William Smith), and Diana Sinton (Spatial Curriculum, Redlands).
What you can do here
Create an account and contribute. Account setup is automated and fast and your email address is kept private.
Once logged in, you can subscribe to content types (blogs, links, discussions, etc.) to get emails announcing new postings -- do this from your My Account page
From the "Create Content" page you can post:
schemas (e.g., models and representations) to help link concepts into broader frameworks of spatial reasoning
Jorge Camoes is one of the serious folks when it comes to dataviz. Here's some work he's done recently in U.S. unemployment data. Note especially the good state-by-state dashboard. It quickly shows New Mexico is hangin' in there.
Here are two ways to display a relatively large dataset, montly unemployment rates by state since 1976. The first one is perfect to see the overall patterns, the range from the lowest to the highest, the outliers and the slopes. An interactive version would allow the user to highlight specific series.
A small-multiple version allows the user to focus on specific states, compare them to the normal band, etc. States are ranked by labor force size and, as you can see, in the first row seven out of ten are above the US average in April. In the last row, only one is above the US average. You can also see that Michigan was not well (unemployment-wire) long before the current crisis, or a spike in Luisiana (Katrina). It pays to study this chart carefully.
Bottom line: try to see the same data from different angles. There will always be semething interesting to find.
What do you think? How would you improve these charts? Would you use a different display? Share it in the comments! (here is the data file)
Update: I usually stay away from Excel’s surface charts, but I’d like to add this one:
Interesting discussion of, fundamentally, how the Digital Revolution drives the flow from products to services and services to products. Ergo, touches on much of what is at the core of SFComplex. See....
The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
An interesting beginning for a potentially valuable and interesting tool....
"Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via O'Reilly Radar and chrisblizzard on Twitter)
Features
Multiple Data Representations Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more...
Major Browsers Support IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+
Open Source Licensed under the BSD License
Library Agnostic You may use the JIT with your favorite DOM manipulation framework
Extensible All visualization classes are mutable, so you can easily add/override any method you want.
Composable Visualizations can be combined in order to create new visualization methods."
Nathan, the chap who curates the valuable blog Flowing Data, offers up a bit of hope for journalists who are worried about their employment futures and yet have invested in learning methods of data analysis. When thinking about re-inventing ourselves, consider the phrase "data scientist."
As we've all read by now, Google's chief economist Hal Varian commented in January that the next sexy job in the next 10 years would be statisticians. Obviously, I whole-heartedly ... more»
Guest Passes let you share your photos that aren't public. Anyone can see your public photos anytime, whether they're a Flickr member or not. But! If you want to share photos marked as friends, family or private, use a Guest Pass. If you're sharing photos from a set, you can create a Guest Pass that includes any of your photos marked as friends, family, or private. If you're sharing your entire photostream, you can create a Guest Pass that includes photos marked as friends or family (but not your private photos). Learn more about Guest Passes![?]
We've been noticing since the first of the year the results of some very creative and sometime brilliant aggregation sites. (Do we need a new phrase for this format?) These sites are richer than Google mash-ups in that they allow far more control by the user. Some, like Mint.com or TripIt.com, also require various degrees of data entry by the user, sometimes with with a surprising degree of detail, both personal and specific. Mapumental, below, pushes the limits of this evolution.
mySociety blog » Say hello to Mapumental
By Tom Steinberg on Monday, June 1st, 2009
We’ve been hinting for a while about a secret project that we’re working on, and today I’m pleased to be able to take the wraps off Mapumental. It’s currently in Private Beta but invites are starting to flow out.
Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time - to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.
In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.
Francis Irving, the genius who made it all work, will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely UI, and to Matthew, for being brilliant as always.
Words don’t really do Mapumental justice, so please just watch the video :) Update: Now available here in HD too
Also new: We’ve just set up a TheyWorkForYou Patrons pledge to help support the growth and improvement of that site. I can neither confirm nor deny that pledgees might get invites more quickly than otherwise ;)
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