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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.

Mr. People Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module - loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module - to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it. Try it out below - paste your own data in or try the sample data. To use the people Ruby gem in your own scripts, sudo gem install people, then read the documentation. Suggestions? Send them to mrpeople@ericson.net Allow couples:   Case:  Output:    Paste your names here:

8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c

Who uses Cohuman? Teams Leads Members Teams Cohuman is ideal for any group of people that needs to communicate more dynamically and effectively than email or traditional collaboration tools will allow. Startups, Distributed Teams, Small Businesses, Deal Teams, Departments in larger organizations... in short Cohuman is for any group that requires a solution designed to coordinate people and manage projects more intelligently. Clear Task Ownership Assigning and tracking tasks is unambigious. Each team member has their personal responsibilities defined. Transparent Communication Everyone on the team knows exactly who is doing what - without extra effort. Intelligent Prioritization Every Task is ranked by Cohuman from the team's inputs in order of priority for people and projects so the important Tasks get done first. Dynamic Updates If a Task priority changes, the information is shared automatically with each team member - no Status update meetings or emails required. Powerful Email Integration Cohuman works for everyone on your team. Even those without a Cohuman account can interact with Cohuman via their email.

When you go to a conference, there are typically several talks going on at the same time, and you can always tell there's a popular paper coming up when you see people leave a bunch of rooms at once and head straight into one. There's also the unfortunate case when someone speaks, and there's only a handful of people in the room, all in the back staring at their laptops. Open Data City visualized this activity during the German internet conference re: publica. Open Data City used MAC addresses and access point connections to keep track of where devices went. So a person might be in a room connected to the nearest access point, disconnects as he leaves, and then reconnects as he reenters another room, which provides the flow. It's fun to watch the conference play out even if you didn't attend. Each dot represents an attendee, and as the animation plays the dots migrate from room to room. Click and drag over the dots to select specific people. [Thanks, Michael]

They Rule Overview They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. Context A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye. Karl Marx once called this ruling class a 'band of hostile brothers.' They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a 'legitimate' force - and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run. The Data We do not claim that this data is 100% accurate at all times. Corporate directors have a habit of dying, quitting boards, joining new ones and most frustratingly passing on their name

I think this data must be very useful to the people in Occupy Wall Street

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts. How is it of use to journalists? "Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground," PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains. Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities. These features - and many more - let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject. Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists. Grill added: The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community. You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

Solving the Pie Chris Gemignani December 14, 2006 By: Chris Gemignani Last week I challenged you to reproduce this alternative to pie charts in Excel. I promised a screencast to show how it's done. http://juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/12/square-pie-screencast/ Square Pie Eighteen people answered the call with nearly three dozen different solutions. Click here to watch the screencast showing how to accomplish the two most popular solutions; filling cells with conditional formatting and pushing the column chart to extremes. If you want to look at the source,Clint Ivy produced an excellent version of the cell filling approach.

http://www.zanran.com/ a search engine for data & statistics. Time to open your data, people! #opendata

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? Simon Rogers: Our 10 point guide to data journalism and how it's changing Share reddit this Comments (2) Data abstract Data journalism. What is it and how is it changing? Photograph: Alamy Here's an interesting thing: data journalism is becoming part of the establishment. Not in an Oxbridge elite kind of way (although here's some data on that) but in the way it is becoming the industry standard. Two years ago, when we launched the Datablog, all this was new. People still asked if getting stories from data was really journalism and not everyone had seen Adrian Holovaty's riposte. But once you've had MPs expenses and Wikileaks, the startling thing is that no-one asks those questions anymore. Instead, they want to know, "how do we do it?"

Introducing Google Map Maker for the United States Google Map Maker lets you add to and update the map, for millions of people to see in Google Maps and Google Earth. You can add your local knowledge for over 180 countries and regions. Get started mapping the places you know. http://www.google.com/help/mapmaker/index.html

Assessing Language Patterns: A Look at Texas Newspapers, 1829-2008 This visualization plots the language patterns embedded in 232,567 pages of historical Texas newspapers, as they evolved over time and space. For any date range and location, you can browse the most common words (word counts), named entities (people, places, etc), and highly correlated words (topic models). [ About Mapping Texts ]

TLOxp® for Investigative Reporters is a cutting-edge online investigative database, giving reporters access to the most accurate, comprehensive information on people, businesses and locations and the connections between them.

Outstanding example of infoviz Gay rights in the US, state by state Gay rights laws in America have evolved to allow - but in some cases ban - rights for gay, lesbian and transgender people on a range of issues, including marriage, hospital visitation, adoption, housing, employment and school bullying. The handling of gay rights issues vary by state and follow trends by region

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]

"About story maps Story maps combine intelligent Web maps with Web applications and templates that incorporate text, multimedia, and interactive functions. Story maps inform, educate, entertain, and inspire people about a wide variety of topics."

"TransparencyCamp '11 Recap Nicole Aro May 4, 2011, 11:28 a.m. Sunlight's fourth TransparencyCamp was this past weekend, and I'd like to take this moment to say to all of our attendees: Thank you -- you guys rock. To everyone else, I'm sorry that you missed such an awesome weekend, but we hope to see you next time around! This weekend was made possible by the generosity of our sponsors: Microsoft, Google, O'Reilly, Governing, iStrategyLabs, Forum One, and Adobe. I'd like to say a special thank you to Patrick Svenburg of Microsoft who stayed late to make sure we could finish setup and even helped us carry supplies(!). The weekend brought together about 250 government workers, software developers, investigative journalists, bloggers, students and open government advocates of all stripes to share stories, build relationships, and plan together to take on the challenges of building more open government. This year, TransparencyCamp also went global, bringing in 22 amazing transparency advocates from around the world to teach, learn and share with us here in the states. "

By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

Zanran helps you to find 'semi-structured' data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts. Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data. Language. English only please... for now. Phrase search. You can use double quotes to make phrases (e.g. "mobile phones"). Booleans. You can use a plus '+' to make a word mandatory, or a minus '-' to exclude it (e.g. +gas -oil production) Vocabulary. We have only limited synonyms - please try different words in your query. And we don't spell-check ... yet.

OpenData Open Data

OpenAustralia.org is a non-partisan website run by a charity, the OpenAustralia Foundation and volunteers. It aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their representatives in Parliament.