FlowingData | Data Visualization, Infographics, and Statistics Data Visualization: Modern Approaches « Smashing Magazine Why Census matters to you Census is any country is important in making major policy decisions and can affect your day-to-day, but it's not always obvious how. Leading up to the August 9 Australia Census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics put together an interactive called Spotlight, which helps its citizens understand the data a little better. Spotlight takes some of the data from the last Census - conducted in 2006 - and turns it into a simple interactive movie, to show just a few of the interesting things that the Census can tell us about Australia's people and population. As you go through the interactive, it asks you little bits about you such as gender and where you live, and then tells you information about what Census says about you and what's around. It also zooms out to put things in perspective. The voice-over helps to make it extra playful. [Spotlight | Thanks, Tim]
WikiLeaks visualizations It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize. NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool. The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. “The sheer volume of observations [in the WikiLeaks database] inhibit the majority of consumers from being able to gain knowledge from it. Conway’s work largely mirrors what the U.S. military’s internal teams of intelligence analysts found. Obviously, the logs don’t tell the whole story of the war, as Danger Room has noted before. See Also:
TreeSheets A "hierarchical spreadsheet" that is a great replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases. Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc. It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical. It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact. It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension. It's like a text editor, but with structure. Have a quick look at what the application looks like on the screenshots page, see how easy it is to use in the tutorial, then give it a download (above). TreeSheets is exceptionally small & fast, so can sit in your system tray at all times: with several documents loaded representing the equivalent of almost 100 pages of text, it uses only 5MB of memory on Windows 7 (!)
Junk Charts Data science We’ve all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly said that “data is the next Intel Inside.” But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data? In this post, I examine the many sides of data science — the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets. The web is full of “data-driven apps.” One of the earlier data products on the Web was the CDDB database. Google is a master at creating data products. Google’s breakthrough was realizing that a search engine could use input other than the text on the page. Flu trends Google was able to spot trends in the Swine Flu epidemic roughly two weeks before the Center for Disease Control by analyzing searches that people were making in different regions of the country. Google isn’t the only company that knows how to use data. In the last few years, there has been an explosion in the amount of data that’s available.