I read a piece last night called 5 Ways Big Data Will Change Lives In 2013. I really wasn’t expecting much from it, just scrolling through accumulated articles on Zite. However, as with so many things, there were some gems to be had. I learned of Aadhar.
Aadhar is an ambitious government Big Data project aimed at becoming the world’s largest biometric database by 2014, with a goal of capturing about 600 million Indian identities.
http://flowingdata.com/2013/01/22/data-points-first-look/
Nathan Yau has a new book coming out, this about working with data. Pre-order now!
Since posting last month about data-sharing concerns with some popular apps, I’ve since learned about Cluefulapp.com which, apparently, helps us see how are data are used by iOS apps. For instance, according to Cluefulapp, Google Maps can read my address book, uses my iPhone’s unique ID, encruypts stored data, “could” track my location, and uses an anonymous identifier.
Waze is somewhat similar. It “could” track my location [quotes are because I wonder what they mean by could—does it?
Source: introducingbooks.com
Over the winter break I was travelling in the UK and I came across this little book called “Introducing Statistics: A Graphic Guide” by Ellen Magnello and Borin Van Loon at the gift shop in the Tate Modern museum in London. The book is published in 2009, and Significance magazine already reviewed it here, so I won’t repeat their comments. I hadn’t heard about the book before, so I picked it up, along with a copy of Introducing Post-Modernism (they were 2 for £10, I had to get two, obviously).
Two years ago, I made a New Year’s Resolution to read more books. At that point I joined GoodReads to hold myself accountable. I read 47 books that year (at least that I recorded). In 2012, I didn’t re-make that resolution, and my reading productivity dropped to 29 (really 26 since I quit reading 3 books). While the number of books is lower, I did some minor analyses on these books based on data I scraped from GoodReads and Amazon.
On New Year’s Eve, All Tech Considered, had a segment looking ahead to interesting technology in the coming year. One of the themes was Big Data, but I particularly liked the way they sold it: “Big Data For Little People.” The basic idea being that much of big data is owned by big companies, which crunch the data for their own purposes. But the NPR folks are seeing a trend for applications that crunch big data and bring the results to your smartphone or other app.
This article at Slate is interesting for a number of reasons. First, if offers a link to a data set listing names and data of the 325 people known to have been killed by guns since December 14, 2012. Slate is to be congratulated for providing data in a format that is easy for statistical software to read. (Still, some cleaning required. For example, ages include a mix of numbers and categorical values.
