MetaFilter posts tagged with information and data

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.

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.

Data Visualization on the Web

nthdegx — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 15:00:44 -0800

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches is a Smashing Magazine article examining a variety of increasingly popular or novel information visualization employed on modern websites.

blinded me with (beautiful) science

oneirodynia — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 12:19:01 -0800

"To determine whether a diagram is good or bad, one needs to determine for what context it was designed for." PingMag (1, 2) interviews Andrew Vande Moere of infosthetics . A quick, informative read which includes pretty pictures of some MeFi faves.

Rare elements

fatllama — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 22:24:58 -0800

A periodic table of visualization methods.

Google starts an internal futures market

rzklkng — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 05:51:22 -0800

Google's Crystal Ball::NYTimes. Quite interesting...Via TechDirt:

Google has created a predictive market system, basically a way for its employees to bet on the likelihood of possible events. Such markets have long been used to predict world events, like election results. Intrade, part of the Trade Exchange Network, allows people to bet on elections, stock market indexes and even the weather, for example.

I wonder how accurate the aggregated content of blogs would be to measure the likelihood of prospective real world events? The economist they consulted, Hal R. Varian, has some interesting links on his web page as well. I think that the internet better get their anti-spam technology up to par before we have people "gaming" the future through blogspam. For an explanation of Futures Markets (charts), see this page at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The memespread project

cbrody — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 02:19:16 -0800

The memespread project. How does a meme spread? What part does MetaFilter play in the process? [via waxy.org]

Do the Terrorists Care about Teenage Smoking?

archimago — Thu, 19 Dec 2002 09:50:48 -0800

Information deemed useful to terrorists is disappearing from government Web sites. I know this is old news, but this article details some of the specifics of whas has been happening. "The previous presumption, that publicly-funded information is the rightful property of the public until proven otherwise, has been replaced by the presumption that the public has to prove to a suspicious government that it deserves the information." I understand that as a nation we are hypersensitive now to terrorism, but isn't this just what the terrorists want? The loss of our freedoms to information?

adrianhon — Wed, 28 Nov 2001 08:36:10 -0800

"The Web, left to its own devices, would be the exact opposite of that: It's like a giant city with no neighborhoods; it needs these kind of meta-filters, these second-level kind of things, whether it is Yahoo or Google or Slashdot, to rein in that chaos and turn it to something more organized." From the second page of an interview with the author of Emergence, Steven Johnson (also co-founder of Feed).