Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
We've long been intrigued with Benford's Law and its potential for Analytic Journalism. Today we ran across a new post by Charley Kyd that explains both the Law and presents some clear formulas for its application.
An Excel 97-2003 Tutorial:
by Charley Kyd July, 2007 (Email Comments)
(Follow this link for the Excel 2007 version.)
Unless you're a public accountant, you probably haven't experimented with Benford's Law.
Auditors sometimes use this fascinating statistical insight to uncover fraudulent accounting data. But it might reveal a useful strategy for investing in the stock market. And it might help you to improve the accuracy of your budgets and forecasts.
This article will explain Benford's Law, show you how to calculate it with Excel, and suggest ways that you could put it to good use.
From a hands-on-Excel point of view, the article describes new uses for the SUMPRODUCT function and discusses the use of local and global range names. [Read more…]
Assoc. Prof. Paul M. Torrens, at Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences (torrens at geosimulation dot com) continues to turn out interesting simulation models. Most recently they are about crowd movement, but the methods are applicable to many venues. See his work at Geosimulation.org
Yet another interesting innovation of mapping. Imagine what this might mean for analysis of tourism sites or crowd control? From O'Reilly Radar (http://radar.oreilly.com/)
Bio Mapping Project in Stockport This Weekend Posted: 20 Jul 2007 01:04 PM CDT By Brady Forrest The Bio Mapping project sponsors people to walk around an area with a GPS and a Galvanic Skin Response sensor and logger. The emotional responses of the participants are then mapped. The map of San Francisco (pdf) was recently completely. They had previously developed a beautiful map of Greenwich (viewable via Flash viewer or Google Earth). The project has been run by Christian Nold for several years now. Here's how he describes the project in an interview: You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated. How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation. This weekend they are biomapping Stockport. If you happen to be in the UK you can participate — I know that I would. I would love to set this up at one of our conferences to watch the emotional response of attendees throughout the day and at different sessions. Did the keynote speaker or product launch really get people excited? What about that debate?
Bio Mapping Project in Stockport This Weekend
Posted: 20 Jul 2007 01:04 PM CDT
By Brady Forrest
The Bio Mapping project sponsors people to walk around an area with a GPS and a Galvanic Skin Response sensor and logger. The emotional responses of the participants are then mapped. The map of San Francisco (pdf) was recently completely. They had previously developed a beautiful map of Greenwich (viewable via Flash viewer or Google Earth).
The project has been run by Christian Nold for several years now. Here's how he describes the project in an interview:
You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated. How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation.
You ask people to go out into the streets and take an emotion walk. Can you explain? Bio Mapping is a participatory methodology for people to talk about their immediate environment, locality and communal space. I'm trying to use 3D visualisation as a way of talking about the space. It's not representational. As part of this method I have developed a device, which can be used by lots of people. It consists of a lie detector connected to a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, which measures your location and your physiological arousal at the same time. By combining the two I can talk about physiological arousal in certain locations. A Galvanic Skin Response sensor in the form of finger cuffs measures the sweat level. Fitted out with this device, people go for a walk and when they return their data is visualised and annotated.
How? By downloading data onto my laptop data it is then transformed by my software and then projected onto Google Earth. The Galvanic Skin Response sensor measures the amount of skin conductivity. I'm suggesting that a change in skin conductivity not only tells something about your body, but also suggests an emotive event. I'm plotting the amount of change in the skin resistance level versus location. There are various technical transformations and averaging I have to do to the data. I'm sampling once every four seconds, because I found this optimal for this kind of spatial representation.
This weekend they are biomapping Stockport. If you happen to be in the UK you can participate — I know that I would. I would love to set this up at one of our conferences to watch the emotional response of attendees throughout the day and at different sessions. Did the keynote speaker or product launch really get people excited? What about that debate?
Our long-time friend Marylaine Block has again served up some good librarian-centric material on her blog/newsletter “Neat New Stuff” and “Exlibrius”. This time it's a fine essay — with links to pertinent sites — on one of our favorite topics, visualization. Here's the top, but go to ExLibris #301 Archive: for the complete package.
VISUALIZING INFORMATION by Marylaine Block On several occasions librarians have asked me to speak about the future of reference service – if, indeed, there IS a future for reference service. I think librarians are worried that the simple delivery of information is not a growth area for libraries because that's where our primary competitor, the internet, excels, with its search engines and resources like Wikipedia. Helping people make sense of the information they've retrieved is something else again, and that, I believe, is where the future of reference service lies. After all, who is dying to compete with librarians in explaining to people how to fill out online FAFSA and FEMA applications? Who is fighting librarians for the opportunity to show people how to select, combine, and chart a variety of data points in government data sets? Who else wants to help students analyze and retrieve the kinds of information needed to solve a problem or research a topic? Who else worries about making sure the information retrieved matches the user's purposes and level of knowledge and sophistication? Who else is interested in providing context for the information? One of the most effective tools we can use to help people make sense of information is visualization.
VISUALIZING INFORMATION by Marylaine Block
On several occasions librarians have asked me to speak about the future of reference service – if, indeed, there IS a future for reference service. I think librarians are worried that the simple delivery of information is not a growth area for libraries because that's where our primary competitor, the internet, excels, with its search engines and resources like Wikipedia. Helping people make sense of the information they've retrieved is something else again, and that, I believe, is where the future of reference service lies. After all, who is dying to compete with librarians in explaining to people how to fill out online FAFSA and FEMA applications? Who is fighting librarians for the opportunity to show people how to select, combine, and chart a variety of data points in government data sets? Who else wants to help students analyze and retrieve the kinds of information needed to solve a problem or research a topic? Who else worries about making sure the information retrieved matches the user's purposes and level of knowledge and sophistication? Who else is interested in providing context for the information? One of the most effective tools we can use to help people make sense of information is visualization.
An interesting conference just completed in the UK. Be sure to scroll down to listen to the presentations and, in some cases, see the slides. Go to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/State_of_the_map
State Of The Map
The State Of The Map is the name of our OpenStreetMap conference(s). However, as there has only been one so far, all the information below refers to the State of the Map conference in 2007, held at the University of Manchester, UK.
OpenStreetMap's first conference was at the centre of the geographical industry universe on the weekend of 14/15 July 2007, supported by Manchester University's School of Environment and Development.
[hide]
FYI: From the O'Reilly Radar
Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics Posted: 11 Jul 2007 03:01 AM CDT By Jesse Robbins I presented last week at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul along with Professor Hans Rosling, Mike Arrington, John Gage and teams from MappingWorlds, Swivel (disclosure: I am an adviser to Swivel) and Many Eyes. We were the “Web2.0 Delegation” and it was an incredible experience. The Istanbul Declaration signed at the conference calls for governments to make their statistical data freely available online as a “public good.” The declaration also calls for new measures of happiness and well-being, going beyond just economic output and GDP. This requires the creation of new tools, which the OECD envisions will be “wiki for progress.” Expect to hear more about these initiatives soon. This data combined with new tools like Swivel and MappingWorlds is powerful. Previously this information was hard to acquire and the tools to analyze it were expensive and hard to use, which limited it's usefulness. Now, regular people can access, visualize and discuss this data. Creating an environment where knowledge can be shared and explored. H.G. Wells predicted that “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.” Proponents of specific public policies often use statistics to support their view. They have the ability to select the data to fit with the policy. Democratization of statistics allows citizens to see the data that doesn't fit the policy, giving the public the power to challenge policymakers with new interpretations. I highly recommend you watch Professor Rosling's exceptional summary of these exciting changes (where I got the title for this post), as well as his talks at TED.”
Unveiling the Beauty of Statistics
Posted: 11 Jul 2007 03:01 AM CDT
By Jesse Robbins
I presented last week at the OECD World Forum in Istanbul along with Professor Hans Rosling, Mike Arrington, John Gage and teams from MappingWorlds, Swivel (disclosure: I am an adviser to Swivel) and Many Eyes. We were the “Web2.0 Delegation” and it was an incredible experience.
The Istanbul Declaration signed at the conference calls for governments to make their statistical data freely available online as a “public good.” The declaration also calls for new measures of happiness and well-being, going beyond just economic output and GDP. This requires the creation of new tools, which the OECD envisions will be “wiki for progress.” Expect to hear more about these initiatives soon.
This data combined with new tools like Swivel and MappingWorlds is powerful. Previously this information was hard to acquire and the tools to analyze it were expensive and hard to use, which limited it's usefulness. Now, regular people can access, visualize and discuss this data. Creating an environment where knowledge can be shared and explored.
H.G. Wells predicted that “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.” Proponents of specific public policies often use statistics to support their view. They have the ability to select the data to fit with the policy. Democratization of statistics allows citizens to see the data that doesn't fit the policy, giving the public the power to challenge policymakers with new interpretations.
I highly recommend you watch Professor Rosling's exceptional summary of these exciting changes (where I got the title for this post), as well as his talks at TED.”
From the Directions Magazine “All Points Blog” …..
A map of O'Hara Corporation's proposed project site in Rockland. (Photo by MapQuest.com)
I'm sure that was a cut and paste error, but I do have a point. As more citizen journalism and more students use the Web to search for and use content, they (and others) need guidance in how to cite such references. Let's assume the map was used under “fair use” (I'm not sure it was). How is it to be cited? Must it include the copyright info for the data? (It does not.) Must it include a link? What do Manuals of Style say? What does MapQuest say?
Author or statement of responsibility. Map Title [map]. Data date if known. Scale; Name of person who generated map; Name of software used to generate the map or “Title of the Complete Document or Site”. (date generated).
Delaware, Ohio [map]. 2001. Scale undetermined; generated by Deb Peoples; using “MapQuest.com, Inc”. (2 May 2005)
The following website offers additional examples: http://library.owu.edu/citing222.html, and a websearch for the phrase “citing maps” yields numerous results.
Concerning copyright, the United States authority has many useful papers demystifying the topic: http://www.copyright.gov/. Another serious examination comes from J.B. Post of the New York Map Society, who has collected map copyright case law from 1789-1998; see: http://www.nymapsociety.org/FEATURES/POST.HTM
#1 Alan Glennon (Link) on 2007-07-09 11:39 (Reply)
Once again, O'Reilly's Radar tips us to an interesting application of cell phone GPS data, this time to illustrate daily traffic activity in Rome.
Real Time Rome: Using Cellphones To Model a City's Movements
Posted: 02 Jul 2007 01:14 PM CDT
MIT's Senseable City Lab is using cellphone data to model Rome's populations. The project is called Real Time Rome. It is an exhibit at architecture conference La Biennale di Venezia's show Global Cities (shown Sept 10 – Nov 19 2006).
There are descriptions about the exhibit from an MIT article about the exhibit:
Real Time Rome features seven large animations, projected on transparent plexiglass screens. One screen shows traffic congestion around the city, while another screen shows the exact movements of all the city's buses and taxis. Another screen is able to track Romans celebrating major events like the World Cup or the city's annual White Nights festival (Notte Bianca, which will happen on Sept. 9, the evening before the Biennale's architecture exhibition opening). Additional screens show how tourists use urban spaces and how cars and pedestrians move about the city.
and how the data was collected:
Ratti's team obtains its data anonymously from cell phones, GPS devices on buses and taxis, and other wireless mobile devices, using advanced algorithms developed by Telecom Italia, the principal sponsor of the project. These algorithms are able to discern the difference between, say, a mobile phone signal from a user who is stuck in traffic and one that is sitting in the pocket of a pedestrian wandering down the street. Data are made anonymous and aggregated from the beginning, so there are no implications for individual privacy.
This certainly would be a more cost-effective method of gathering traffic data for determining commute times. Imagine if predictive systems could prepare us for the onslaught of traffic from a baseball game just letting out by watching the fans head towards there care. Or let us know that a highway is about to be flooded by traffic from a side road. Would you put up with your location being (formally) tracked in exchange for this service?
[BBC via Data Mining]
