MetaFilter posts tagged with data

A Guide To Rivers, Plains, Planets, Stars

The Whelk — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:26:04 -0800

Peacay of BibliOdyessey highlights some stunning examples of Victorian Infographics from the Rumsey Map Collection(previously). (Direct Flickr link)

The Confessions of an NBA Scorekeeper

reenum — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:33:17 -0800

The Confessions of an NBA Scorekeeper Gawker's Tommy Craggs talks with an ex-scorekeeper for the Vancouver Grizzlies, and reveals the subjectivity of stat keeping in the NBA. This guy once gave Nick Van Exel 23 assists just because he felt like it.

Need ammo?

Neilopolis — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:55:38 -0800

How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic: "...a handy one-stop shop for all the material you should need to rebut the more common anti-global warming science arguments constantly echoed across the internet."

Do you reason with the grue? Turn to page 19.

creeky — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:30:45 -0800

Beautiful data visualisations of the original Choose Your Own Adventure stories. A project by Christian Swinehart.

Google answers data transparency concerns with Dashboard

zarq — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:18:56 -0800

This morning, Google launched a new feature called "Google Dashboard" that lets users view (and in some cases control,) what data is being stored on a range of more than 20 Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts and Latitude. Services not currently included -- Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, and Book Search among others -- will be added in later versions. This new service may help address privacy concerns that have been raised over the years regarding various Google services. More from: * The Unofficial Google Blog * TechCrunch * The New York Times * CNET

Open Toronto

GuyZero — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:37:45 -0800

Toronto's Open Civic Data. The city of Toronto has released its data to the world via the new Open Toronto initiative: geographic data for a variety of civic divisions, lists of licensed business, public transit stops, routes & schedules, a SOAP-based geocoding API and more.

No Census, No Feeling

twoleftfeet — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:03:54 -0800

Time was, even the Three Stooges didn't fear the Census. But now, turbulent political and economic times roiling the nation are expected to diminish initial participation by households in next year's Census. To counteract this, the Census will spend an unprecedented $326 million in marketing, including a Super Bowl ad, and will appear in a Spanish-language telenovela. The decennial Census, conducted every ten years since 1790, has always had to explain itself. There were PSAs in 1980, an outreach in 1990, and a whole campaign in 2000 (with its first Super Bowl ad). The 2010 Census has already led to a number of crazy conspiracy theories and possibly the death of a Census worker (previously) so the job may be harder. The Census provides a wealth of data (previously: 1, 2), but can the need for interesting facts keep us from fearing the people who come to our door?

Do you like Billie Jean?

carsonb — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:18:41 -0800

He wasn't even supposed to perform, but when Michael Jackson took the stage solo at the Motown 25 in 1983, magic. Billie Jean. The moonwalk. The glove. It was one of those moments to remember. So a few years ago a coupla data dancers started The White Glove Tracking Project to commemorate the performance by analyzing the height and size of MJ's iconic white glove throughout, crowdsourcing the project frame by frame for 10,060 frames. Now the dataset is complete, and the Proce55ed magic is thrilling:
Slinky (75mb QT), Stretchy (45mb QT), and Shapely (33mb QT) by MeFi's own James Seo
Speed=Height (QT) by Zach Lieberman
Giant White Glove by Tim Knapen
and more in the gallery.

Job Voyager

OmieWise — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:37:50 -0800

Job Voyager: a data visualization tool for US occupations as a percentage of the labor pool, 1850-2000. (Stream graphs previously)

Archive Team

stbalbach — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:45:59 -0800

Archive Team: We are going to rescue your shit. (previously)

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore

WCityMike — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:36:31 -0800

"Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore," by Robin Sloan. 'A short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization.' (via Boing Boing) A really nice short story with many choice turns of phrase. Despite having first found out about it from Boing Boing, after reading it, I thought it was just too good not to share with all of you.

Know Thy Congressman

sciurus — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:29:45 -0800

Know Thy Congressman (an Apps for America Project of Sunlight Labs) provides a handy bookmarklet that lets you get a quick overview of Congresscritters that you might not be familiar with. The winners for Round Two of Apps for America (focusing on data.gov) were announced yesterday.

Round 1 submissions for Apps for America (previously)
Round 2 submissions for Apps for America
Round two winners:
- DataMasher - Create your own mashups. Want to know how many unemployed people there are per square mile? Find out here.
- GovPulse - Browse & filter the Federal Register.
- This We Know - Discover what data the government has on your community.

Death Risk Rankings

OmieWise — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:57:19 -0800

"Death Risk Rankings calculates your risk of dying in the next year and allows you to compare that risk to others in the world." Fun with mortality data and statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Knowledge Is Power. Beauty Is Truth.

SinisterPurpose — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:49:08 -0800

See What You Think. Information Is Beautiful.

zeitgeist visualized

nickyskye — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 07:33:46 -0800

Digg Labs' Arc is a mesmerizing data visualization flash with an ongoing collage of various topics, a sort of animated zeitgeist: How to bake cheeseburger cupcakes l Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don’t want to know l The Newest Giraffe: As Cute As He Thinks He Is? l Wascally Wabbits l Stories arrange themselves around the circle as users digg them.

Peering into your neighbors' windows (in aggregate)

dammitjim — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:46:40 -0800

The fine folks at OkCupid, the dating site, have begun to analyze aggregate data from the questions their users answer to form dating profiles, revealing, among other things, that users in Nevada are more open to rape fanstasies than those from Michigan. OkCupid users often answer hundreds of such questions, and various tests, in an effort to increase their match effectiveness. OkCupid has just started their blog discussing a few questions, and ask "These are just a few of the thousands of questions we have in our database. Are there any other you’d like us to analyze?"

BankTracker

A dead Quaker — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:07:23 -0800

Curious about the health of your bank? You might find BankTracker helpful. This site crunches the FDIC's publicly available numbers on banks' deposits, loans, and nonperforming loans, and makes them available in a search interface for banks and credit unions. Also interesting are the blog posts. From one of the most recent: Total troubled assets – the sum of loans more than 90 days past due and the value of foreclosed property banks on bank books – increased to $285 billion at the end of March, up from $237 billion at the end of 2008. At the end of March 2008, the banks only had $137 billion in nonperforming loans and foreclosed property on their books. The combination of lower profits and more bad loans meant that more banks saw their capital under growing stress. As of March 31, 238 banks had more troubled assets on their books than they had in capital and loan loss reserves. At the end of December 2008, 165 banks had a “troubled asset ratio” of greater than 100 percent. Only 44 banks fell into that category a year ago.

The Guardian Data Store Competition

johnny novak — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:40:35 -0800

The Guardian Datastore is running a competition for the best visualizations, mashups and applications built with and for the data in their datastore. Amongst other things, they currently have the latest data on MP's expenses, world booze consumption and two centuries of bio diversity data from Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbriger explains why data and the Guardian Datastore matters, and for the sake of balance a dissenting voice. (previously)

Data.gov - a new toy for data geeks, librarians, and transparency advocates everywhere

gingerbeer — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:46:00 -0800

Data.gov is live! The Obama Administration is trying to bring transparency and a little sunshine to those cold, hidden government databases, like the FBI, NOAA, and the Census Bureau. Data.gov is getting some mixed reviews. There’s not a lot of data in it yet, although you can suggest your favorite federal database (you do have a favorite federal database, right?) It may not be any better than what private citizens have already done. The Sunlight Foundation has already announced a competition to build the best application and visualization for the data. What can you find?

Tour the AlloSphere

twoleftfeet — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:53:52 -0800

Tour the AlloSphere, a stunning new way to see scientific data. In this TED talk, composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin describes some visualizations available at the AlloSphere Research Facility, where researchers stand inside a 3-story sphere and are surrounded by visual and sonic representations of data. Some specific visualizations in the video: fly through a brain, biogenerative algorithms, lattice of atoms, Schrodinger equation, and electron spin.

Twenty Times a Day

shoesfullofdust — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:57:07 -0800

...the Department of Transportation will not keep secret the data we collect on birds striking airplanes. - Ray LaHood, United States Secretary of Transportation

From the dreaded mourning dove to the nefarious Canada goose to the humble armadillo, the FAA's recently released National Wildlife Strike Database ON-LINE contains information on aircraft/wildlife strikes from over 100,000 reported incidents between 1990 and 2008. The database was referenced previously in the Birdstrike in the Hudson thread, but until this week the the F.A.A. provided only aggregate data about wildlife strikes - collisions by state, not by airport. Submit your query here or download the current version(15 MB MS Access format) from this page. Federal Aviation Administration - Wildlife Hazard Mitigation Home Page. Wildlife Strikes to Civil Aircraft in the United States 1990 - 2007 - A comprehensive analysis of the database (pdf format). Sharing the Skies (TP 13549E) is an online book about the subject of aircraft/wildlife strikes from Transport Canada.

Mother's Little Helper was only in trouble if it was mislabeled

Asparagirl — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:26:18 -0800

The US Food and Drug Administration started regulating the labeling of food, beverages, and medicines after the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and added food coloring and cosmetics with the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. They have just released a new website, the FDA Notices of Judgment Collection, 1906-1963, containing data from thousands of cases of mislabeled or misadvertised products and drugs, available in multiple forms (text, PDF, metadata XML, .TIF image, etc.), with searchable archives. Poking around in the data will yield information on cases ranging from misbranding methamphetamine tablets, to quack "Film-O-Sonic" devices, to bacteria-laden unproven abortifacients sold over the counter, to purported "4-way" cures for baldness, to hunks of radium sold for putting in your drinking water to "stimulate the sex organs" (judged against for stating an unproven use, not for actual danger of product). Organized by the FDA's history office, the new database is a fascinating resource for historians, public safety advocates, researchers, and librarians.

Expenses Mashup

djgh — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:20:11 -0800

Following Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's expenses claim for pornographic films watched by her husband, which came hot on the heels of an investigation into expenses claims for MPs' second homes, the Guardian has published data on each MPs' claims. Now, it's been combined with data from They Work For You to create a map showing MPs' expenses claims, revealing interesting anomalies.
An investigation into MPs' expenses is forthcoming. [Previously]

Sparkline Information Graphics

netbros — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:25:24 -0800

Speaking of Edward Tufte (see below), sparklines are a type of information graphics characterized by their small size and data density named by Tufte. Sparklines were used by sites reporting the 2008 election and were first introduced on MeFi in 2005. There are now several ways to put sparklines on your own web site including: a simple jQuery plugin, a downloadable PHP library, a dynamic generator using a Python CGI program, and even a library for Ruby on Rails.

visualizing data

nickyskye — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:01:53 -0800

20 Useful Visualization Libraries from the excellent A Beautiful WWW. Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available. A Beautiful WWW created by Todd Holloway.