Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
The past week or two has brought some press stories about games being designed/developed as tools for learning, as in “productive learning,” not learning how to inflict terror or be a better car-jacker. We recently ran across the site below, “Social Impact Games.” It's well worth a visit, as are the others.
We think these have great potential for journalism as tools to help readers/viewers learn how government, eduction, schools, the legal system and nature work.
Good links to simulation games:
*) Social Impact Games. This one is a very rich jump site: http://www.socialimpactgames.com or http://tinyurl.com/ygpa75 *) http://www.playmassbalance.com/ *) http://www.budgetsim.org/nbs/ *) http://www.peacemakergame.com/
From the website: “Combines humor, opinion, and fact to bring an entertaining and informative video game adventure to people everywhere.
“The use of this medium will hopefully reach many people who have not had the time or interest to read up on some of the appalling things that have taken place in our government and society over the past four years. For those of you who are paying attention, hopefully this game has helped to clarify some of the important things at stake in the upcoming elections. I realize that this game does not cover every issue, problem, and appalling action of the Bush administration. There are too many stories to report. Some issues ended up taking a back seat to others. Just know that this is just a silly game and please inform yourself for real and read books…and most importantly…please vote.”
By Starvingeyes/J. Oda.
Another unique investigation by The New York Times gets A1 play in this Sunday's edition (1 Oct. 2006) under the hed “Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings.” Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts (who probably did the heavy lifting on the data analysis) took a long-term look at who contributed to the campaigns of Ohio's Supreme Court justices. It ain't a pretty picture if one believes the justices should be above lining their own pockets, whether it's a campaign fund or otherwise.
In any event, there seems to be a clear correlation between contributions — and the sources — and the outcome to too many cases. A sidebar, “Case Studies: West Virginia and Illinois,” would suggest there is much to be harvested by reporters in other states. There is, thankfully, a fine description of how the data for the study was collected and analyzed. See “How Information Was Collected“
There are two accompanying infographics, one (“Ruling on Contributors' Cases” ) is much more informative than the other (“While the Case Is Being Heard, Money Rolls In” ), which is a good, but confusing, attempt to illustrate difficult concepts and relationships.
At the end of the day, though, we are grateful for the investigation, data crunching and stories.
Any discipline always has subsets of argument, typically about definitions, methodologies, process or significance. Statistics, of course, is no different. Below is an interesting article from the Washington Monthly about what constitutes statistical significance. The article is OK, but the commentary below it even better. See http://www.blogware.com/admin/index.cgi/cmd=post_article
Friend Steve Guerin tips us to “Cabspotting,” a fascinating site created by San Francisco's Exploratorium. It's about georgraphy, traffic flow, and complexity. Give a look to “Cabspotting”
Cabspotting traces San Francisco's taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible. The Exploratorium has invited artists and researchers to use this information to reveal these “Invisible Dynamics.”
The core of this project is the Cab Tracker. The Tracker averages the last four hours of cab routes into a ghostly image, and then draws the routes of ten in-progress cab rides over it.
The Time Lapse area of the project reveals time-varying patterns such as rush hour, traffic jams, holidays and unusual events. New projects are produced by the Exploratorium's visiting artists and also created by the larger Cabspotting community.
OK, OK. Maybe we've crossed over some line social acceptability, but this is neat addition to the analytic journalist's toolbox. My friend Mike Collins tips us off to:http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=236
Lifehacker, delicious folks! This post generated a ton of great community ideas. Check out our followup post to see some more ideas and to download a spreadsheet with demos. Thanks.
We often are given a chunk of data in Excel that we need to explore. Of course, the first tool you should pull out of your toolbox in cases like this is the trusty PivotTable (it slices, it dices!). But at times we have to dig a little deeper into the toolbox and pull out the in-cell bar chart. Here’s what it looks like.
This picture shows some Major League Baseball data. I’m graphing the number of walks each player has taken. The bar graphs are built using the Excel REPT function which lets you repeat text a certain number of times. REPT looks like this:
=REPT(text,number_of_times)
For instance, REPT(”X”,10) gives you “XXXXXXXXXX”. REPT can also repeat a phrase; REPT(”Oh my goodness! “,3) gives “Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! ” (my daughter’s an Annie fan).
For in-cell bar charts, the trick is to repeat a single bar “|”. When formatted in 8 point Arial font, single bars look like bar graphs. Here’s the formula behind the bars:
What are some practical uses of in-cell bar graphs? For starters, they offer a good way to profile a dataset that has hundreds or thousands of rows. Here’s a picture of in-cell bars compared to a standard excel bar graph for a dataset with about 500 rows. It can be a lot easier to scan the results when they’re in-cell.
Another usage is lightweight dashboards. The report below compares a number of metrics for players using both in-cell bar graphs as well as conditional formatting. The conditional formatting highlights the top 25% of each metric in green and the bottom 25% in red but that is a story for another day.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under analysis, excel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Fascinating display of global statistics on site, Gapminder The homepage currently has some dynamic displays related to Human Development Trends: 2005. Well worth watching, but be sure to scroll down the page to scan all the useful articles and presentations available.Then, perhaps saving the best for last, go to the Gapminder Tool at http://tools.google.com/gapminder. Note that you can play with the axes to change (a) what is graphed and (b) how it is graphed (log or linear), and hit the play button on the bottom to see how the numbers changed over the past years. [Thanks Patti Schank for this good tip.]
Subscribe or go straight to the graph.
Contact gapworld@gapminder.org with questions or suggestions for improvements.
Some interesting presentations this morning on visualization and modeling as they can be applied in GIS. See:
Check out http://vissim.uwf.edu/ This is a growing library of public domain shape models. “This website offers access to a new hierarchical data structure that allows the efficient storage of natural and man-made feature data for use in a multitude of both manual and computerized Mapping, Charting & Geodesy systems.”
Also, interesting visualizations at http://www.redlands.edu/x12556.xml
“The (Ongoing) Vitality of Mythical Numbers<http://www.slate.com/id/2144508/ >This article serves as a valuable reminder that we should viewall statistics, no matter how frequently they are used inpublic arguments, with skepticism until we know who producedthem and how they were derived.” From: Neat New Stuff I Found This Week <http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html> Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2006.
From the good folks at Internet Scout:
Kudos this morning to National Public Radio's reporting on a Duke professor who thought the numbers on Chinese engineering grads seemed a little off kilter.
by Adam Davidson
Morning Edition, June 12, 2006 · A report cited in The New York Times and quoted on the House floor claimed China graduates nine times as many engineers as the U.S. Skeptical, a Duke professor had students check the numbers.
