No such thing as bad results - just creative stats

For light relieft this week, statistical proof of the unstoppable rise of Brazilian rugby (subtitles).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKnQn-8PFII

Three Interesting Data Analytics (and Visualisation) Things

Three interesting analytics finds online this week folks.

First, an article from the Guardian newspaper about the new publicly available "crime map" from the UK (www.police.uk):

"All the crime map shows up is Whitehall's pointless zest for data" by Simon Jenkins

It seems to me that the author misses the power of making data accessible and the real problem is that the data being made available here is overly curated.

The next two are both visualisation tools. Hipmunk (www.hipmunk.com) is a flight search tool that visualises flight availability in an interesting new way. Also their derived variable "agony" would be well worth understanding more (how can you define such a subjective measure?). Prof. Barry Smyth from UCD has an interesting review on his blog.

Finally (and thanks to Colman McMahon for pointing this one out), LinkedIn have launched a tool called LinkedIn Maps (inmaps.linkedinlabs.com) to help you visualise your professional network. Again it would be interesting to know how they choose node colours, sizes and positions relative to each other. A very interesting tool though.

Data + Database Design for Data Analytics

Dr. Pierpaolo Dondio should have been in touch by email re this module.
Classes will start for this module on Wednesday Feb 16th
All material will be covered as expected