I See What You Mean

My New Year's gift to all y'all is this recommendation: RUN DON'T WALK to download  Google Refine . (No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.) Refine is an app that expedites data cleaning, thereby eliminating hours and hours of tedium and letting me get to the fun parts of the project sooner. Google Refine I will certainly be putting it through its paces this year.  If you do check it out, let me know what you think.

Urging users to be "Data Rockstars" (oy), software company Tableau is sponsoring a visualization contest . Entrants are to select and depict one of two data sets: proposals for US stimulus projects or data from 2007 mortgage applications around the nation . I look forward to seeing the results.

As part of his larger mission of promoting "fact-based" public health policy, Swedish physician Hans Rosling founded Gapminder.org , which aims to make world health data available and understandable to everyone. Back in 2006, Rosling gave a well-received TED presentation on the principles of Gapminder, showing, among other things, relative historical changes in life expectancy and GDP. ( He spoke again in 2007. ) Rosling acknowledges that there are some small flaws and inconsistencies with data derived from all these different sources, but believes that the comparative results are far more significant. Check out the vast difference between Mauritius and Congo in income per person and life expectancy (shown on the Gapminder site and in the '06 presentation); consequently, says Rosling, using the term "sub-Saharan Africa" to describe both of these countries is vague to the point of uselessness. His point: The more easily data and details can be visualized and co