Tufte is a philosopher king who reigns over his field largely because he invented it. For years, graphic designers were regarded as decorators, whose primary job was to dress up facts with pretty pictures. Tufte introduced a reverence for math and science to the discipline and, in turn, codified the rules that would create a new one, which has come to be called, alternatively, information design or analytical design. His is often the authoritative word on what makes a good chart or graph, and over the years his influence has changed the way places like the Wall Street Journal and NASA display data.
In policy circles, he has exerted a quiet but profound influence on those seeking to harness the terabytes of data flowing out of government offices. In recent years, several large American cities, including New York, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., have opened up entire universes of municipal statistics, giving birth to a cottage industry of programs and applications that chart everything from the best commuting routes to block-by-block crime patterns. And under the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive of 2009, the federal government has been releasing scores of downloadable data sets. In the public realm, data has never been more ubiquitous—or more valuable to those who know how to use it. “If you display information the right way, anybody can be an analyst,” Tufte once told me. “Anybody can be an investigator.”
via The Washington Monthly – The Magazine – The Information Sage.
rePost :: Heritage Health Prize: Is $3 million enough to improve the U.S. health care system? – By Annie Lowrey – Slate Magazine
Wish I could join a team trying to win this.
“We often find the winners come from electrical engineering and physics,” explains founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom. “Theyre common-sense disciplines, where people are used to problem-solving. Rather than spending time on questions like Should I be using this algorithm or this system? and What outcomes are we looking for? the engineers and physicists just try to answer the question.”The size of the kitty should pull in quality teams—Heritage says it expects scores of competitors. The question surely seems answerable. But there are concerns that remain. For instance, Goldbloom says that Heritage and Kaggle have worked hard to ensure that the people behind the data set remain anonymous. It seems like an outlandish possibility. But de-anonymization has killed prizes before. Netflix, for instance, pulled its second $1 million public competition after computer scientists figured out who some of the users in the data set were. Goldbloom is working with Canadian researchers who specialize in keeping health information private, as well as with one of the computer scientists who cracked the Netflix prize, to test the data set.But on the first day of the two-year competition, everyone was optimistic. “Im hoping that people will be attracted [to the contest] intellectually and for the betterment of mankind,” Merkin says. “The only way families can have affordable health care is if we try to make the system a little more efficient.”Thats certainly a $3 million question.
via Heritage Health Prize: Is $3 million enough to improve the U.S. health care system? – By Annie Lowrey – Slate Magazine.
Elink Video :: Hans Rosling's The Joy of Statistics
Finally found the time to watch this. Woke up at 4:30 am was able to read a few things and walk around a little.
Learned Today :: Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet — The Endeavour
Uber useful!!!
Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet
by John on March 30, 2010
Suppose you’re proofreading a book. If you’ve read 20 pages and found 7 typos, you might reasonably estimate that the chances of a page having a typo are 7/20. But what if you’ve read 20 pages and found no typos. Are you willing to conclude that the chances of a page having a typo are 0/20, i.e. the book has absolutely no typos?
To take another example, suppose you are testing children for perfect pitch. You’ve tested 100 children so far and haven’t found any with perfect pitch. Do you conclude that children don’t have perfect pitch? You know that some do because you’ve heard of instances before. But your data suggest perfect pitch in children is at least rare. But how rare?
The rule of three gives a quick and dirty way to estimate these kinds of probabilities. It says that if you’ve tested N cases and haven’t found what you’re looking for, a reasonable estimate is that the probability is less than 3/N. So in our proofreading example, if you haven’t found any typos in 20 pages, you could estimate that the probability of a page having a typo is less than 15%. In the perfect pitch example, you could conclude that fewer than 3% of children have perfect pitch.
via Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet — The Endeavour.
Elink :: Worldometers – real time world statistics
This website is awesome. Data wonks WOOT!!!
Worldometers – world statistics updated in real time
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World Population
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| Current World Population | ||
| Births this year 1 | ||
| Births today 2 | ||
| Deaths this year | ||
| Deaths today | ||
| Net population growth for today 3 | ||
| 1) “this year” = from January 1 (00:00) up to now 2) “today” = from the beginning of the current day up to now 3) “net population growth” = births minus deaths |
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