Need music data? Get all the data you want and more from the freely available million song dataset, offered by LabROSA at Columbia University and Echo Nest. There’s lots of metadata on song features and your standard stuff like year and artist. There are also several code wrappers and samples to help researchers make use of the data right away.
[Million Song Dataset via @MacDivaONA]
The list of one-off applications that visualize your digital life, whether it be your Twitter feed, Facebook updates, or Foursquare checkins, has been growing for a short while. Ben Cerveny and Tom Carden, both Stamen Design alumni, aim to take this idea to the next level with Bloom, with elements of game design.
Read More
FYI: Freakonomics, the Movie is available to watch instantly on Netflix right now. It is of course based on the highly recommended first book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I just watched it last night, and it’s not as good as the book, but still an interesting watch. If anything, it’s worth watching just to see Levitt talk about data. The exchange between Levitt and Dubner is also pretty entertaining.
I haven’t read the second book, SuperFreakonomics, yet. Thoughts?
What and how much people drink depends a lot on what country you’re in or what culture you’re exposed to. Personally I grew up in a low-alcohol family. It’s not that we thought it was bad, but just because, well, it didn’t really occur to us to do that. The Economist shows these differences via this world map on average alcohol consumption, according to a recently released report by the World Health Organisation.
The world drank an average of 6.1 liters per person in 2005, but it was significantly more in Europe and the Soviet states. Hey, you gotta stay warm somehow, right?
Have a look at this map for legal drinking age. Is there any relationship? Doesn’t seem to be a very strong case.
[Economist | Thanks, Elise]
Charles M. Blow has a look at some metrics for the International Monetary Fund’s “Advanced economy” countries. As Americans, we like to think that we’re the best at everything, but in many instances, that just isn’t the case. Sometimes we’re the worst.
[New York Times via @charlesmblow]
If you love baseball and have an iPad, you need Pennant, a project by Steve Varga. The app lets you explore every game and play since 1951. See the numbers for your favorite player or team with just a few taps or swipes while you’re plopped on your couch watching the game. Imagine: one hand with an ice cold beverage, iPad on your lap, and the game on in front of you.
Read More
NASA briefly explains the water cycle:
Water regulates climate, predominately storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carry heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean, to the atmosphere, to the land and back to the ocean is called the water cycle.
The three animations above show hourly evaporation, water vapor, and precipitation, based on “data from the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 25-days.” I’m not even going to pretend like I know what I’m talking about, but it is fun to watch the simulated global water movements. Remember, these are based on actual data. They are not closeups of lava lamps.
[Video Link via Data Pointed]
I can’t resist. It’s about food and those chickens are just so cute. View the full guide to eggs on culinaut.
Here’s something to chew on while you wait for the 2011 slam dunk contest to get a move on already. It’s a score history of all of the dunks from 1984 to 2010, complete with video. From the commentator after Michael Jordan’s first dunk in round 3 in 1988: “I like to call that the Chinese Superman dunk. He goes in slanted.”
[Hoopism via @infochimps]
A Grammy win is worth way more than a little trophy and some short-lived fame. It’s worth actual cash. As shown in this graphic by Wilson Andrews and Mike McPhate for the Washington Post, album sales two weeks after winning shoot up from two weeks before the awards show.
Last year, album sales only went up 56 percent for the Taylor Swift album Fearless, compared to a plus 891 percent bump for the 2009 winners, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant. However, considering the relative obscurity of this year’s winner, Arcade Fire, I suspect a bump more like the latter.
After a sluggish launch by police.uk to unleash local crime data, the Guardian and Doug McCune teamed up to provide a tool that lets you compare crime rates in different England cities:
The government’s recent launch of police.uk saw a phenomenal public reaction. Within hours of going live, millions of users had attempted to gain access to maps permitting street-level scrutiny of crime incidents across the UK. Dogged by “technical problems”, the site was reported by many to have failed in the face of public interest. Although the servers now seem much more capable of dealing with ongoing demand, we couldn’t help but wonder if we could offer people some alternative ways to compare and contrast crime levels around the country.
Turnaround time: four days, completely with SpatialKey.
[Guardian | Thanks, Doug and Simon]
With Google’s recent data-related offerings, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that they’ve opened up their Public Data Explorer so that you can upload your own data. Previously, it was only available when you searched for something like “GDP” and a related dataset was supplied by an official provider.
[W]e’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.
In terms of visualization, there’s isn’t anything new. You’ve got your maps, bar charts, and time series line charts, with the checkboxes on the left (like the snapshot below). Then there’s the chart types available via the charting API.
Read More
To encourage the integration of broadband and information technology into local economies, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (with some help from Stamen) now provides an exploratory tool for broadband in your community:
The National Broadband Map (NBM) is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States. The NBM was created by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and in partnership with 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia. The NBM is a project of NTIA’s State Broadband Initiative. The NBM will be updated approximately every six months and was first published on February 17, 2011.
There’s a lot of data to look at, but you can search for the city or zipcode that you’re interested in, and get information on what’s available, as shown below. You can also see how your city compares to other locations in the country.
Read More
Sunlight Labs continues its work for a more open government with its recent release of the Real Time Congress API.
Today we’re making available the Real Time Congress API, a service we’ve been working on for several months, and will be continuing to expand.
The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible. It consists of several live feeds of data, available in JSON or XML. These feeds are filterable and sortable and sliceable in all sorts of different ways, and you can read the docs to see how.
There are seven data types the API will report:
Now someone has to do something with all of this data coming in. Can you think of a useful application for what is essentially an automated government Twitter feed?
There’s something very strange about the anonymity of the Web that brings out the worst in some people. I don’t get it, but it’s something we have to deal with for now. Courtney Stanton, who wrote a couple of posts that drew the ire of a bunch of trolls, had a look at the troll comments versus the sincere ones.
I should warn you that the following content does contain adult themes, but it’s the contrast between the groups that’s most interesting (and the good use of Many Eyes).
Read More
Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, along with his students, has been studying the sex work industry since the 1990s. In a recent article for Wired, Venkatesh describes how the business has changed over the past couple of decades.
Read More
We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but it doesn’t ever seem to get old. Peter Ørntoft takes some data and puts it into physical context:
The project deals with data from a list of the social related interests of the Danish people. The list is the result of an opinion poll from a major consultancy company in Denmark. I have used the context of specific opinion polls within each interest to shape and design diagrams. By doing so the receiver understands more layers of information about the data.
The graphics above and below show Danish opinion on whether it’s ethical to wear religious symbols in public professions. At their core, they’re just pie charts. Embed them on clothing relevant to the topic though, and somehow they become more than that.
Read More
Television actors can make boat loads of money. Some more than others. Hugh Laurie makes $400,000 per episode while Ashley Tisdale makes $30,000. TV Guide compiled a list of TV’s top earners a while back, so luckily we can take a look by the numbers. Here’s your chance to visualize the data.
You can download the data in CSV format or in Excel. There are four columns: actor name, show, pay per episode, and show type (comedy or drama). I entered this data by hand to get it in a manageable format, so keep an eye out for typos (just like in real life!).
The challenge here will be that there’s quite a few names on the list, so it’s a bit too much to show every value at once. You’ll have to decide what you want to show and what story you want to tell. Do actors in drama or comedies make more? What kind of distribution do you see? How do top actor salaries compare to that of the average actor?
One more time, here’s the link to the CSV and Excel files. Leave links to your graphs in the comments below.
Deadline: February 22, 2011
It’s that time of year again. Obama recently released his 2012 budget proposal for how to allocate $3.7 trillion. It’s complicated no doubt, but Shan Carter and Amanda Cox of the New York Times make it easier to understand with their interactive treemap. Rectangles are sized by proposed spending and colors indicate percent change from previous year. Darker red rectangles represent bigger drops from the 2011 budget and darker green greater increases. Zoom in and pan as you please.
Read More
Tonight on Jeopardy, the first day of the IBM Watson challenge, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter will go up against IBM’s super computer in the historic match of man versus machine. In place of a person, a computer screen with an animated graphic will stand representing Watson, but it’s not just some random icon.
The avatar is actually a work of generative art designed by Joshua Davis and implemented by Automata Studios. The avatar changes based on a number of factors such as confidence in an answer and question type for a total of 27 states. For example, when Watson enters an answer correctly, the swarm around the sphere flows to the top and turns green. When Watson answers incorrectly, the swarm turns orange and flows to the bottom.
Get the full description and a sense of the process in the video below.
Read More
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Available now.
