depressing, interesting

The New York Times has an interesting (and somewhat depressing) interactive times series graph of US unemployment rates. The controls let you slice the data demographically to get a sense of how groups you are not a part of might be feeling the effects of the recession. For the dryness of the presentation, this data tells a very compelling and human story.

geolocation + open data = awwesome

Coming across our desk via tweet from Sir Time Berneers Lee: an amazing (if not amazing looking) google maps based data mashup showing marine traffic throughout the world. That is to say, Real Time (not really but close) data showing position, speed and heading for ships throut the worlds major shipping lanes. The Mashup runs on top of a big open data set hosted by the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. More information about the project can be found at the open dot dot dot blog. Anyway go check it out.

One funny thing, it shows traffic on canals and rivers, so when you first look at the map you may wonder why there are forty boats in Missouri.

So, so cool.

The team behind the core technology that became photosynth is taking things to a much higher level. Sameer Agarwal and his band of computer vision desperadoes rebuilt Rome (or a reasonable simulation thereof) in just under 24 hours. This feat was pulled off using 150,000 images pulled from Flickr and some extremely hot computer vision research.

Check out the digest version here and the full nerd monty here.

I’m posting this now because the Open Data movement seems to be getting some traction–at least in Government circles. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration launched Data.gov a clearing house for government data. Washington D.C. has become a leader in municipal public data, putting some 260 feeds of data out in raw form. And now the UK has decided to get in on the act: Gordon Brown the embattled Prime Minister, announced yesterday that none other than Sir Tim Himself would be heading up the initiative to open  England’s data up to the public.

This was largely damage control after a series of embarrassing disclosures about how members of Parliament expense things, but it is a welcome development all the same.

We here at Graphient wish Sir Tim the best of luck moving forward and very much hope that FreeTime will become the application of choice for those looking at all that data.

Read the BBC article here.

Ok, randomness is a really hard thing. Deriving actual randomness is hard work. A lot of mathematical models have been created over the years to describe randomness. Conveniently for you dear reader, this guy Daniel A. Becker has visualized a bunch of them for you. Enjoy this tasty and nutritious treat here.

Poisson Distribution. Look out Roger Mexico.

Read the NY Times article here and feel the burn.

The results of all that mining and processing look like this:

Awesome. Find out more about his methodology and check out some animation here.