Over a year ago, Google released Dataset Search in public beta. The goal was to index datasets across the internets to make them easier to find. It came out of beta: Based on what we’ve learned from the early adopters of Dataset Search, we’ve added new features. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset...
San Francisco. Canada. London. Details on our 2020 trainings. » San Francisco Wed 19th Feb A few tickets left for a rare intimate workshop with IIB founder, David McCandless. (link) » Canada April Announcing dates soon for Toronto, Montreal & Ottawa. Join the notify list. » London Tue May 5th New date added. Other days sold out. (link) What’s it about? Discover how we produce popular projects like Beautiful News...
Using one of my recent projects as an example, I describe my non-elegant process of making a quick chart. Read More
So get this. There are these things called radio stations that broadcast music using frequency modulation. They call it “FM radio.” You don’t download or stream the music, and you don’t get to choose what songs you want to hear right away, but sometimes you can call locally and request a song you like. It’s also free to listen to if you have this thing called a “radio.” In exchange,...
File another one under the sounds-good-on-paper-but-really-challenging-in-practice. Kashmir Hill, for The New York Times, describes the challenges of new laws that allow users to request the data that companies collect on them: Since then, two groups of researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to fool the systems created to comply with G.D.P.R. to get someone else’s personal information. One of the researchers, James Pavur, 24, a doctoral student at Oxford University,...
For The New York Times, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries looked at the current state of facial recognition in law enforcement: Officials in Florida say that they query the system 4,600 times a month. But the technology is no magic bullet: Only a small percentage of the queries break open investigations of unknown suspects, the documents indicate. The tool has been effective with clear images — identifying recalcitrant detainees, people using fake IDs...
Reader Murphy pointed me to the following infographic developed by Altmetric to explain their analytics of citations of journal papers. These metrics are alternative in that they arise from non-academic media sources, such as news outlets, blogs, twitter, and reddit. The key graphic is the petal diagram with a number in the middle. I have a hard time thinking of this object as “data visualization”. Data visualization should visualize the...
Based on names data from the Social Security Administration, we look at trends, how common your name is, and how similar it is to others. Read More
Following up on his mini-app to draw ridgeline maps for elevation, Andrei Kashcha made a tool to draw a streets map of anywhere in the world. Enter a city, and using data from OpenStreetMap, you’ve got yourself a map for export. You can also easily change the color scheme to your liking, which is fun to play with as you scroll back and forth. Finally, Kashcha also put the code...
