Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
David Herzog posts this good tip to the NICAR-L list:
From All Points Blog. Read down into the original posting to see speculation as to why. Perhaps “user mapping fatigue”?
The company “What's New” page says little about why, just that the goodies are gone.
We have discontinued the A9 Instant Reward program, and the A9 Toolbar and personalized services such as history, bookmarks, and diary. To get help uninstalling your A9 Toolbar, visit toolbar.a9.com. We have also discontinued A9 Maps and the A9 Yellow Pages (including BlockView™).
One of the major aspects of the Digital Revolution that has long intrigued us is how it is driving a shift in power away from institutions and people of traditional authortiy to the individual.
A great example of how this is happening was reported in today's (1 Oct. 2006) NYTimes. “A Town’s Architectural Shift, Chronicled Online” was started by Montclair, New Jersey resident Liz George. She is managing editor of Baristanet, a community Web site and forum, added an interactive map to the site to keep a record of teardowns in her town. The NYT reports:
“On Sept. 22, the Web site started a new feature to chart the town’s changing architectural landscape — an interactive map that shows teardowns, homes with historic designations and recent construction.
“'Maybe something like this will give people pause,' said Ms. George, 39, in her office at her gracious 100-year-old home. 'Knowing you’re having your house on the teardown map, knowing it will be part of this trend, I don’t think it has a positive implication.'
'The teardown issue has taken on a sense of urgency here after a developer bought the blue-shuttered Colonial-style house, on North Mountain Avenue, for $870,000 last fall and demolished it this summer with plans to build six town homes. The action led town officials to rezone about 200 lots — including the North Mountain Avenue property — from a designation that allows up to eight units on a single lot to a designation that allows only two. The developer has since dropped his plans and has put the empty lot up for sale.
Of course, a newspaper could have done the same thing, but so far as we know, none has. So the least the industry could do is supply the software apps, and maybe some instruction, to let citizens build their local databases.
A interesting mapping project today from Abuquerque's DWI Resource Center. A map showing a surprising clustering of the city's DWI-related events. Wouldn't it again be an interesting reporting tool — and a draw for readers — if a newspaper were to create a dynamic and regularly updated map of this sort for its market area?
The Bernalillo County DWI Crash Map is a new tool to help citizens avoid drunk drivers by assisting them in locating the more dangerous roadways in and around Albuquerque and allowing them to plan alterative commuting routes and times. The DWI Crash Map indicates locations around the county with the highest incidents of alcohol-related crashes, and the areas in the county with the highest concentrations of alcohol establishments. The map also contains charts showing alcohol-related crashes and DWI arrests by time of day.
Although a citizen's best defense against a drunk driver is to always wear a seat-belt and drive defensively, this map can assist you in planning your daily commute to avoid high-risk intersections and times of day when alcohol-related crashes are most likely to occur.
To view the map, you will a need free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Eight or nine years back we attended one of the first Crime Mapping conferences sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and found it to be one of the most creative and practical events of this type. (We also have very high regard for the ESRI Users Conference and the Special Libraries Assoc. meetings.) So we want to be sure to let all analytic journos know about next year's Crime Mapping confab, scheduled for March 28 to 31, 2007 in Pittsburg, Penn. Here's part of the official call for papers:
The Mapping & Analysis for Public Safety Program announces it's Call for Papers for the Ninth Crime Mapping Research Conference in Pittsburgh, PA at the Omni William Penn Hotel, March 28 to 31, 2007. The deadline for submission is Friday, September 29th.... The theme of this conference will be Spatial Approaches to Understanding Crime & Demographics. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial data analysis techniques have become prominent tools for analyzing criminal behavior and the impacts of the criminal justice system on society. Classical and spatial statistics have been merged to form more comprehensive approaches in understanding social problems from research and practical standpoints. These methods allow for the measurement of proximity effects on places by neighboring areas that lead to a multi-dimensional and less static understanding of factors that contribute to or repel crime across space.The 9th Crime Mapping Research Conference will be about demonstrating the use and development of methodologies for practitioners and researchers. The MAPS Program is anticipating the selection of key accepted presentations for further development of an electronic monograph on GIS, Spatial Data Analysis and the Study of Crime in the following year. Its purpose will be to demonstrate the fusing of classical and spatial analysis techniques to enhance policy decisions. Methods should not be limited to the use of classical and spatial statistics but also demonstrate the unique capabilities of GIS in preparing, categorizing and visualization data for analysis....
For more, see: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/
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.
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
This week Mark Hartnett, of the Palm Beach Post, alerts us to a map he and his paper recently published, a map of the hometowns of the U.S. troops killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afganistan. They did a similar map a year ago, but one that reflected the gross numbers of the dead from each city. This year they put those numbers in context by displaying the rate of deaths per 100,000 population. It makes a difference and raises new questions. Note that the height of the columns reflects, as Mark Hartnett points out in his comment below, the number of deaths while the color indicates deaths-per-100,000 residents ages 18-64.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t1n20rynvsqvbk0g14g8pth0vlnbl1yd
Social scientists create maps of online interactions
Multimedia: Maps and audio charting human interactions in cyberspace
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
Philadelphia
If the Internet is a new kind of social space, what does it look like?
That's a question of particular interest to social scientists eager to see what cyberspace might reveal about the nature of human behavior.
Researchers, after all, have long sought to map social groupings and interactions in the physical world. Now, with so much activity on computer networks, scientists can collect vast amounts of hard data on human behavior. Each blog points to other blogs in ways that reveal patterns of influence. Online chats can be tallied and parsed. Even the act of clicking on links can leave trails of activity like footprints in the sand….
