mages' blog

The data of the World Bank is absolutely amazing. I had said this before, but their updated iPhone App gives me a reason to return to this topic. Version 3 of the DataFinder App allows you to visualise the data on your phone, including motion maps, see the screen shot below.

Screen shot of DataFinder 3.0

I was intrigued by the by the changes in life expectancy over time around the world. The average life expectancy of a new born baby in 1960 was only 52.6 years, and don't forget we are in 2012, 52 years later. Babies born in 2009 can expect to live to the age 69.4 years, an increase by nearly 17 years or 32%. That is remarkable. But these are average figures and vary a lot by country.

The world bank's online version of the map unfortunately lacks the the animation of the smartphone app. Thus I was keen to find out if I could reproduce something similar in R based on code and ideas provided to me by Manoj Ananthapadmanabhan and Anand Ramalingam last year. Those ideas had helped me to create the animated geo maps demo "AnimatedGeoMap" of the googleVis R package.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) worked together with OpenDataCity to create an online train monitor of the German network: Zugmonitor. This is another great example of the new form of data journalism.

The project provides access to data of train delays collected over 150 days between 2 October 2011 and 1 March 2012 and allows you to analyse the delays in more detail.

Here is an example showing the delays by station.

This SZ article (in German) gives you an overview of the data and how to access it. I believe the most convient method to query the data is to use the Google Fusion tables. It allows you to import the data into R with the read.csv function. The filename to use is an url mixed with a little bit of SQL syntax.

The other sources can be accessed in the same way:

I am curious what people will make of the data. Apparently more data will be made available in the future. I will keep an eye the project page.

The guys behind the Google Visualisation API don't seem to rest. On 22 February 2012 they released an update of their API. Google added options for a gradient colour axis to bubble chart and a magnifying glass to geo chart, which opens when the user hovers over cluttered markers (excluding IE<=8). Those updates have been incorporated into version 0.2.15 of the googleVis package for R.

Examples of new features

Here are two examples demonstrating the new features.

Bubble chart with gradient colour mode

I had mentioned the Guardian's data blog and the need for more data journalism earlier here. What I really like about the Guardian's approach in particular is that they share the data of their articles and encourage readers to use it.

Of course there are perfectly valuable reasons for only displaying a chart and not making the underlying data available, e.g. to generate leads, as potential customers may get in touch with you asking for the underlying data, or technology issues that don't allow you to upload data, etc.

I personally believe that when I show a chart I should also make the underlying data available. Pretty pictures give you the attention, but the underlying data will offer you an opportunity to engage with your reader on a different level. This might be similar to open source software. In most cases users don't want to see and read the code, but having the knowledge that they could provides more credibility.

Screen shot of plot digitizer using Guy Carpenter's global property catastrophe rate on line index

Here is another reason why I should make the data available: Because it is easy to extract the data from a chart anyhow, thanks to digitizing software like the Java application plot digitizer. While in the past I may have used graph paper and a ruler, nowadays it only takes a few minutes to extract the information.

Removable disk packs in 1975. By Eugen Nosko Source: Wikipedia, via Deutsche Fotothek License: CC-BY-SA

David Chan from City University is organising an interdisciplinary symposium on tackling the ‘Big Data’ challenge on 1 March 2012.

It is an open seminar trying to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle the challenges posed by "big data" - the growing amount of information that needs to be stored, searched, analysed and visualised in the digital age.

The event will take place in the Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB. Booking is required if you would like to attend. For more details check out the event page.

See you there.

During my university time I worked on the IT help desk for a while. One day I received a call from a professor, who said that his printer had stopped working. So I asked him, if there was a message on the display and if he could read it to me. "Oh yes", he said, "it says: 'Load A4 paper.'"

Rachel King quotes a study by Cisco on ZDnet, which believes to have found out that college students and young employees under the age of 30 would rather take a lower salary than having no social media freedom, device flexibility and work mobility.

It feels like the 1960's in a lot of offices and IT departments of today. A younger generation is demanding more freedom and fun. It just not called rock music, mini skirts or of course the anti baby pill, which the generation of my professor was fighting for. That's all established now. It is the digital equivalent of those rights and I can understand that IT departments are concerned about this.