#data (95 links)
- Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same laurenleek.substack.com
A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes.
- How does food get traded around the world? | Our World in Data ourworldindata.org
- Three things about data undermanager.ghost.io
Youch.
Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.
- Clear Off the Table darkhorseanalytics.com
In the gif below we start with a table formatted similar to one of Excel's many styling options which, much like the chart styles, do nothing to improve the table. Progressive deletions and some reorganization deliver a clearer and more compelling picture.
- The Design Philosophy of Great Tables posit-dev.github.io
Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising sophistication and nuance in designing effective tables. Over the past 5,000 years, they’ve evolved from simple grids to highly structured displays of data. Although we argue that the mid-1900s served as a high point, the popularization and wider accessibility of computing seemingly brought us back to the simple, ancient times.
Such AI-driven dynamic pricing is already a reality in mainland Europe, as grocery retailers such as DIA in Spain, Iper in Italy, Metro in Germany, and Hoogvliet in the Netherlands are rolling out the technology.
- Snake Oil Supplements — Information is Beautiful informationisbeautiful.net
Scientific evidence for popular health supplements
- Corporate Legibility for Software Engineers matt.blwt.io
Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those not directly involved.
- Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data simonwillison.net
what they are, why you want one, how to build them and some of the interesting things you can do once you’ve set one up.
- Architecting data in Eleventy sia.codes
- RunGap - Workout Data Manager on the App Store apps.apple.com
- HealthFit on the App Store apps.apple.com
- +1 for healthfit. So glad I discovered it! I do exactly the same as you. I bar a... | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
+1 for healthfit. So glad I discovered it! I do exactly the same as you. I bar any other fitness apps from writing data directly to Apple Health (but allow them to read), with the exception of my Withings scales that are allowed to only write weight data.
- Observable beta.observablehq.com
<blockquote>The “surveillance business model” of building up detailed electronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive results in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for something you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early days of Facebook and the first generation of “retargeting” services.
But a look at Facebook’s ad-card rates shows that the novelty of this technique wears off fast. Facebook was founded on the premise that it could use its mounting dossier on your behavior to figure out how to sell you things faster than your natural defenses would repel its pitches. If that ideology was borne out, you’d expect to see the company’s cost-per-thousand ad rates climbing into the stratosphere. Instead, they’re damned close to the rate you’ll pay for regular, minimally targeted display advertising elsewhere.</blockquote>
- Care.data is in chaos. It breaks my heart - Ben Goldacre theguardian.com
<blockquote>There are people in my profession who think they can ignore this problem. Some are murmuring that this mess is like MMR, a public misunderstanding to be corrected with better PR. They are wrong: it's like nuclear power. Medical data, rarefied and condensed, presents huge power to do good, but it also presents huge risks. When leaked, it cannot be unleaked; when lost, public trust will take decades to regain.</blockquote>
It gets worse.
<blockquote>It's painful for me to write critically about a project like care.data, because I love medical data, and I know the good it can do. We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS. Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.
So here's my advice: if you're thinking of opting out – wait. If you run care.data – listen. </blockquote>
So frustrating.
- A simple guide to Care.data wired.co.uk
<blockquote>Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.</blockquote>
- Climb every mountain: visualising the world's 50 highest peaks | News | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
"A multi-faceted visualisation of the world's 50 highest peaks. The interactive graphic, made using Tableau Public, features a clickable map of the summits, satellite images of each peak and figures for each mountain's prominence and overall elevation." Nice.
- The Exporter export.synack.me
- Another guy named Mike - Backup GMail publicstatic.net
- Unhosted: separating web apps from data storage unhosted.org
"We break the package deal »you get our app, we get your data« with remoteStorage, a cross-origin data storage protocol separating application servers from data storage." Yes to the principle.
- Commercial Use of your API – why you should allow it | The London Biker thelondonbiker.com
Good suggestions for API access levels.
- Internet Video Archive internetvideoarchive.com
The entertainment industry's leading aggregator of movie and TV trailers, game previews, and music videos. With 500,000 unique video assets from over 1000 content providers, IVA has established a reputation as the archive of record for audio visual samples.
- google-refine - Project Hosting on Google Code code.google.com
A power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
- Hacker News | The Best Free and Open Source Data Mining Software news.ycombinator.com
- Climate Change: Evidence climate.nasa.gov
NASA says, "the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling".
- The Quantified Self kk.org
Build your own multi-purpose mobile self-tracking application.
- Datasift - Tuning Your Tweets datasift.net
Gives developers the ability to leverage cloud computing to build very precise streams of data from the millions and millions of tweets sent everyday.
- Welcome | ScraperWiki scraperwiki.com
All the tools you need for Screen Scraping & Data Mining.
- The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.
- Introduction sta.mn
Stamen's @shawnbot has put together a great context/history of dataviz for the class he is teaching at SVA in NYC:
- teach yourself datamining in 21 days « Armory Data Mining armorydatamine.wordpress.com
While it is important to understand how the algorithms work, it is not necessary to work the maths by hand. There are some first class freeware datamining programs available that do all the heavy lifting, so long as you know how to prepare the data and how to set the parameters of the algorithms so they produce valid results.