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Jonathan Stray of the Associated Press on investigating thousands (or millions) of documents by visualizing clusters. Presentation is from February 2011 at the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting. Visualizations built with multidimensional scaling algorithm Glimmer.

Europe's One-Stop Shop on Public Sector Information (PSI) Re-use Working to Stimulate PSI Re-use The aim of the ePSIplatform is to strenghthen community, stimulate action, report developments and monitor progress towards a stronger and more transparent environment for the growth of national and European PSI re-use markets. Interactive One-Stop Shop News about European and International PSI re-use Developments Emerging Good Practices Examples of New PSI Re-use Products and Services Information about Legal cases on PSI Re-use Discussion, Communication and Information Sharing across the European PSI community Expert PSI Community Meetings (two meetings per year) Guest Bloggers from the European PSI Community PSI Topic Reports - Analytical Briefings on PSI Re-use (across sectors and issues) PSI Re-use Resources What is PSI re-use? - background information - the European PSI Re-use Directive translated into 27 EU languages and European Commission Communication on Re-use of PSI Directive (language variants) (May 2009) plus other key links and resources.

A good platform to understand what is happening in the Open Data - Europe movement.

Get TargetMap Premium for 7 days! Happy Mapping! We have reached 10 Million visitors... and we keep evolving! Targetmap has released a new Territory Manager and we're giving you 7 days Premium use in Targetmap for FREE to celebrate it. Territory Manager will let you: - See on the Map how your clients and Sales Reps are distributed - Aling and optimize your sales force potentials by Postal Codes (improving the customer service and saving expenses) - See and assign your Franchise's coverage area and evaluate their potential. - Export the Map to your presentations and the final Data to your CRM or Call Center. Maybe you want to give us a bit of your time and watch this video (it lasts 15 minutes... But there are so many features!) http://targetmap.blogspot.com/2011/09/get-targetmap-premium-for-7-days.html

if you go to the website testingbenfordslaw.com you'll see the proportions of each leading digit from lots of real-world datasets, graphed alongside what Benford's law predicts they should be, with data from Twitter users' follower counts to the number of books in different libraries across the US

The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats Using Benford's law, forensic statisticians can spot suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and estimate the chances figures have been tampered with

10 ways to screw up your spreadsheet design Recommend +21 Votes 36 Comments 46Share more + By Susan Harkins June 23, 2011, 8:25 AM PDT Takeaway: How you set up a spreadsheet determines its efficiency, usability, and reliability. Avoiding these pitfalls during the design phase will save you a million headaches. Wrong references, missing values, and invalid data aren't the only things that will ruin a spreadsheet. The development process starts before you do a thing, while you're planning the design. These types of mistakes are worse than bugs because you can't troubleshoot them. All you can do is start over. Here are 10 mistakes to avoid early in the process, when you're still in the decision-making phase.

A good list and read down into the comments; additional good tips there.

What is Meograph? Meograph helps easily create, watch, and share interactive stories. Our first product combines maps, timeline, links, and multimedia to tell stories in context of where and when. Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface. Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in two minutes or explore for an hour. Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics ... Meograph is both.

"RegExr is an online tool for editing and testing Regular Expressions (RegExp / RegEx). It provides a simple interface to enter RegEx expressions, and visualize matches in real-time editable source text. It also provides a handy RegExp snippet sidebar with descriptions and usage examples to make it easier to learn Regular Expressions through trial and error. It isn't as powerful as a product like RegExBuddy, but it has the advantage of being online and free. I will be releasing a free desktop version for Mac OSX and Windows built with AIR in the next day or two. So far this has only taken a day of development, and the main app is only 150 lines of code. Flex 3 makes this kind of app so darn simple to put together."

How Overview turns Documents into Pictures by Jonathan Stray on 06/04/2012 | 0 Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets - beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering.

Sarah Cohen, Duke University

The new online Who Owns What Database launched by the Institute of Security Studies in Cape Town on Friday is making the assets and private interests of all elected officials available to the public for the first time. Originally launched in September 2009, the database of politicians' assets and onterests contained approximately 9000 financial disclosure records submitted between 2004 and 2010 by elected members in the National Assembly, National Cabinet, nine provincial legislatures and metropolitan councils. The database has recently been extended to include the latest financial disclosure records of elected local councillors from municipalities across the country. "What this means is that the public can access the financial disclosure forms of all elected politicians online," Collette Herzenberg, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said at the launch of the database.

Another good model for other nations to emulate/build on. Congrats to the friends in SA.

A bold experiment in distributed education, "Introduction to Databases" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. Students will have access to lecture videos, receive regular feedback on progress, and receive answers to questions. When you successfully complete this class, you will also receive a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Professor Jennifer Widom, the curriculum draws from Stanford's popular Introduction to Databases course. A syllabus and more information is available here. Sign up below to receive additional information about participating in the online version when it becomes available.

An Applied Demography Toolbox A collection of applied demography programs, scripts, spreadsheets and databases. If you have any questions (such as how to apply the tools to your own work), recommendations or additions, you can send a message to me (Eddie Hunsinger) at edynivn@gmail.com. If you would like to use, share or reproduce any information or ideas from the linked files, be sure to cite the respective source. Here is a neat article that gives this site some inspiration. Acknowledgments. Subscribe to new postings . Return to Eddie's homepage. http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~eddieh/toolbox.html#MedianCalculator

These tend to be US-centric, but there are universal tools here for statistical analysis.