Squandrous
-
Showing posts tagged web
-
I’m not one to talk about work very often, but I did want to tell you all about the launch of Google’s Public Data Explorer yesterday.
The new product in Google Labs lets you access datasets from organizations like the World Bank, the OECD, the US Census Bureau, and others, to visualize data related to a variety of topics. The World Bank datasets that are available are a subset of the World Development Indicators, and contain data from over 40 years on key global indicators like GDP, fertility rates, debt, and CO2 emissions.
If you work with data, or use data to illustrate and support your work, this new Google labs visualization tool is going to help, a lot. Promise. Check it out when you get the chance. Even if you don’t work with data, the motion graphs are mighty fun to watch.
-
-
The site When Do They Sleep lets you figure out the sleeping schedules of your favorite friends on Twitter. It is, surprisingly, mostly accurate. I’d peg my sleeping times from 11pm-5:30am, but 12-6 is pretty close.
Which reminds me, it’s almost time to go to bed.
-
According to an article in Fast Company, Facebook’s data team has been analyzing happiness indicators for various countries over the past year. From Fast Company:
Back in October 2009 Facebook began this experiment, using anonymized status updates from its U.S. users and correlating key words inside them with the Gross National Happiness Index (a movement dedicated to assessing how cheery or upset a nation’s citizens are.) Essentially Facebook’s data team picked key phrases that relate to positive or negative emotions, made a frequency count of their occurrence and look at how the resulting data trends over time.
Among the conclusions? We all love Fridays and don’t particularly love Mondays. Also, a few great observations about Canada:
- Canadian happiness about Thanksgiving peaks the evening before Thanksgiving day. Since the day itself is a Monday, it seems the Canadians are subject to the same Monday woes as the rest of the world.
- Canadian happiness is affected by a little cross-border feeling from the U.S.—happiness indices show small peaks on July 4th and U.S. Thanksgiving.
- While everybody likes Valentine’s day, it looks like the Canadians like it the most.
For more on Facebook’s data team, check out their Facebook page.
-
I use Google Docs quite extensively for my work and for my volunteer engagements — it is a perfect document collaboration tool. The new changes they rolled out yesterday make the tool even better, and will hopefully make it easier for me to convince all my coworkers to switch over and stop sending documents by email attachment.
-
I was standing at the side of a bridge somewhere in the middle of nowhere on Vancouver Island, staring down at the water. The river felt like it was a few feet and a thousand miles below me at the same time, its water rushing faster than I had expected and murkier than I would have liked. The bridge was stable, sturdy, but still seemed to sway in the light breeze as I stood on the ledge, taking in the sunlight. I wasn’t scared — I was ready.
So I jumped.
