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What is Spokeo? Spokeo is a people search engine that organizes vast quantities of white-pages listings, social information, and other people-related data from a large variety of public sources. Our mission is to help people find and connect with others, more easily than ever.

"The Open Data Handbook This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine."

Visualization contests around the corner May 25, 2011 to Contests | Comments (3) The best way to learn how to visualize data is to grab a dataset and see what you can do with it. You can read as many tips and tricks as you want, but you're not going to get any better until you actually try. Contests are a fun way to do this. Participate So here are a handful of visualization contests to get your hands dirty. Hey you might even win a couple of thousand dollars. Not that money matters to you, because as well all know, learning is your reward. Hacking Education - A contest for developers and data crunchers. DonorsChoose.org has inspired $80 million in giving from 400,000 donors, helping 165,000 teachers at 43,000 schools, and the donation site has opened up this data. Can do you do something with it? Deadline: June 30, 2011. Data In Sight - A hands-on competition in San Francisco's SoMa district with surprise data sources. Some talks, lunch, dinner, and a 24-hour hackathon. Event date: June 24, 2011 (better to register your team early). Tableau Interactive Viz Contest - This one is coming up the quickest, but is the most straightforward. Plus, you get a t-shirt just for entering. Grab some business, finance, or real estate data and go to town with Tableau Public. Deadline: June 3, 2011.

The Investigative Dashboard (ID) is a work in progress, that is designed to showcase the potential for collaboration and data-sharing between investigative reporters across the world. The initiative is spearheaded by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the International Center for Journalists, and will expand to include other institutional members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The project is coordinated by Paul Cristian Radu (of OCCRP and CRJI) and Justin Arenstein (of FAIR) and was developed while both were in residence at Stanford University as Knight fellows. The John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists made possible the ID by providing access to the know-how of co-fellow journalists and of experts at Stanford University and in Silicon Valley. This first iteration of the ID website shares detailed methodologies, resources, and links for journalists to track money, shareholders, and company ownership across international borders. It also shares video tutorials, and other tools, to help journalists navigate often rapidly evolving data-sources. Future versions of ID will offer more advanced collaborative workspaces, data-archives, and discounted (or, where possible, free) access to expensive or proprietary research services. But, perhaps most importantly, the ID will campaign for investigative centres across the world to collaborate with each other to improve the depth and impact of their reportage.

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.

Mapping Sheets Another favorite Google Drive add-on of mine is definitely Mapping Sheets. With this add-on, you can make better use of any geographical data you may have in your spreadsheet. If you've ever wanted an easy way to quickly plot locations from your data onto a Google Map, this is it. drive addons8   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Using it is ridiculously easy. Just make sure you've got a list of addresses and other related data in your sheet, and then trigger this add-on. You'll see a form where you tell it what columns in your sheet to use for creating the map. drive addons9   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Once you submit it, the add-on creates the map right in the sheet for you so that you have a useful visualization of all of that data.

ntroduction to Infographics and Data Visualization: Knight Center's first Massive Open Online Course "Bookmark Registration is now open for the Knight Center's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). The course will formally begin on Sunday, October 28, 2012 through Saturday, December 8, 2012. Below are course details and how to register. The introductory area of the course is now available to enrolled students. The introductory area includes access to the course syllabus and the introductory overview video for the course. Course Dates: Sunday, October 28, 2012 - Saturday, December 8, 2012 Course Language: English Instructor: Alberto Cairo Course Objectives: * How to analyze and critique infographics and visualizations in newspapers, books, TV, etc., and how to propose alternatives that would improve them. * How to plan for data-based storytelling through charts, maps, and diagrams. * How to design infographics and visualizations that are not just attractive but, above all, informative, deep, and accurate. * The rules of graphic design and of interaction design, applied to infographics and visualizations. * Optional: How to use Adobe Illustrator to create infographics.

In this piece, I'll try to demystify JSON so that you can at least recognize it when you come across it. Again, it is just a data format. Reading and understanding JSON doesn't require programming. But after you see how JSON is used, you'll realize why it might be worth your while to learn some programming.

What is WinMerge? File Comparison More Screenshots… WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

WorldPublicOpinion.org WorldPublicOpinion.org is an international collaborative project whose aim is to give voice to public opinion around the world on international issues. As the world becomes increasingly integrated, problems have become increasingly global, pointing to a greater need for understanding between nations and for elucidating global norms. With the growth of democracy in the world, public opinion has come to play a greater role in the foreign policy process. WorldPublicOpinion.org seeks to reveal the values and views of publics in specific nations around the world as well as global patterns of world public opinion. WorldPublicOpinion.org was initiated by and is managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes.

Statistical Reasoning 1 http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/StatisticalReasoning1/coursePage/index/ Most people could probably use a bit of a refresher on statistical reasoning and its methods, and this free course from Johns Hopkins University is a great way to get started on the road back to statistical literacy. The course was originally taught by John McGready and provides "a broad overview of biostatistical methods and concepts used in the public health sciences." Users will find that the home page includes links to the course syllabus, schedule, lecture materials, readings, and additional assignments. The Lecture Materials area includes course notes from the seven modules here. The topics include "Describing Data," "An Introduction to Hypothesis Testing," and "When Time Is of Interest: The Case for Survival Analysis." Visitors can also take advantage of the assignments, which correspond to the readings and the lecture materials. The site is completed by the Other Resources area, which includes a special lecture on the software package Stata and a flowchart designed to help students learn how to choose the correct statistical procedure for the task at hand. [KMG]

Download Download your Esri Maps for Office. Esri Maps for Office requires Office 2010 or later. Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x86) 32-bit (70MB) Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x64) 64-bit (70MB) Download the version of Esri Maps for Office that matches the bit version of Microsoft Office 2010 you have installed, not the version of your operating system (OS). If you are not sure, open Excel (or other Office application), click the File tab, and select Help. In the About Microsoft Excel section on the right, the version information states whether the Microsoft Office 2010 installation is 32-bit or 64-bit. Once your download is complete, open Excel.

This looks to be a very valuable tool.

Using Overview to analyze 4500 pages of documents on security contractors in Iraq by Jonathan Stray on 02/21/2012 0 This post describes how we used a prototype of the Overview software to explore 4,500 pages of incident reports concerning the actions of private security contractors working for the U.S. State Department during the Iraq war. This was the core of the reporting work for our previous post, where we reported the results of that analysis. The promise of a document set like this is that it will give us some idea of the broader picture, beyond the handful of really egregious incidents that have made headlines. To do this, in some way we have to take into account most or all of the documents, not just the small number that might match a particular keyword search. But at one page per minute, eight hours per day, it would take about 10 days for one person to read all of these documents - to say nothing of taking notes or doing any sort of followup. This is exactly the sort of problem that Overview would like to solve. The reporting was a multi-stage process: Splitting the massive PDFs into individual documents and extracting the text Exploration and subject tagging with the Overview prototype Random sampling to estimate the frequency of certain types of events Followup and comparison with other sources

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It has two components: the physical part supports the close inspection of high quality reproductions of maps for display at conferences and education centers; the online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of how these maps work. The exhibit is a 10-year effort. Each year, 10 new maps are added resulting in 100 maps total in 2014.

Human rights groups collect data containing details of human right abuses from various sources, including medical records, newspaper articles, witness testimonies, letters, interviews, and official reports and documents. Analyzer can be used to capture this data for analysis. Data is coded according to the "Who did what to whom" model and entered into the capture set of Analyzer. Data about the source of the information is entered in the source tab, shown in Figure 1. (Note: the data in the figures shown here, unless otherwise indicated, are from a sample, not an actual, dataset.)

Data-Driven Journalism Workshop on EU Spending: Tools & Techniques. Utrecht, 8th-9th September. Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lucy Chambers The following post is by Liliana Bonegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The post announces a joint workshop between the EJC and OKF, focusing on how to get started with data-driven reporting on spending data. This workshop will focus particularly on EU spending data. Interested in data-driven journalism and EU spending? The European Journalism Centre together with the Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting a one and a half day data-driven journalism workshop on EU spending in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 8th-9th September.

ITA Software is proud to introduce Needlebase™, a revolutionary platform for acquiring, integrating, cleansing, analyzing and publishing data on the web. Using Needlebase through a web browser, without programmers or DBAs, your data team can easily: acquire data from multiple sources: A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needlebase uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record. Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needlebase's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map. Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Needlebase dramatically reduces the time, cost, and expertise needed to build and maintain comprehensive databases of practically anything. Read on to learn more about Needlebase's capabilities and our early adopters' success stories, or watch our tutorial videos. Then sign up to get started! http://needlebase.com

Beautiful but Terrible Pyramids: Tableau Edition by Jorge Camoes on July 12, 2011 Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census Bureau. Here is the result. I never really played before with Tableau Public and it took my less than an hour to upload the data and make this chart, without reading a manual or watching a tutorial (changing line colors was the hard part). It says a lot about its usability. http://www.excelcharts.com/blog/beautiful-but-terrible-pyramids-tableau-edition/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JCCharts+%28Excel+Charts+Blog%29

Select your favorite nation. Note how this could be used to illustrate population changes for a single nation over time or nation-to-nation comparisons.

Matthew Ericson « Illustrator MultiExporter script: Now with JPG and EPS When Maps Shouldn't Be Maps View full interactive map on nytimes.com » Often, when you get data that is organized by geography - say, for example, food stamp rates in every county, high school graduation rates in every state, election results in every House district, racial and ethnic distributions in each census tract - the impulse is since the data CAN be mapped, the best way to present the data MUST be a map. You plug the data into ArcView, join it up with a shapefile, export to Illustrator, clean up the styles and voilà! Instant graphic ready to be published. And in many cases, that's the right call.

Goals and Topics Our goal with this workshop is to bring together data storytellers from diverse disciplines and continue the conversation of how these different fields utilize each other's techniques and articulate principles for telling data narratives. Our target participants are researchers, journalists, bloggers, and others who seek to understand how visualizations support narrative, stories, and other communicative goals. Participants may be designers of such visualizations or designers of tools that support the creation of narrative visualizations. Visualizations that serve as a "community mirror" and thus create opportunities for discussion, reflection and sharing within a social network are also suitable topics. While we are inspired by many visualizations that display personal histories and storylines, our focus is on visualization situated in storytelling contexts, not necessarily visualizations of stories. Specific topics of interest may include, but are not limited to: Media and genres Embedding visualizations in social media to tell stories Multimodal storytelling with visualization (e.g. narrated or acted visualization, such as Rosling's Gapminder presentations) Non-traditional narrative - games and other procedural narratives incorporating data Visualization in (data)journalism - how news stories and visualization can complement each other Visualizations that support specific types of stories: Personal stories ("Here's a history of my cancer treatment") Community and collaboration stories ("How has our Facebook group changed over the past year?") Public data sets and narrative ("What is your Senator doing with your taxes?") Fictional, semi-fictional, and non-fiction stories