ReliefWeb: Google and FAO launch new Big Data tool for all. “Earth Map is an innovative and free-to-use Web-based tool to provide efficient, rapid, inexpensive and analytically cogent insights, drawn from satellites as well as [Food and Agriculture Organization]’s considerable wealth of agriculturally relevant data, with a few clicks on a computer. Earth Map has also been designed to empower and provide integrative synergies with the federated FAO’s Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform, a more comprehensive tool to provide Members, their partners and donors with the means to identify and execute highly-targeted rural development initiatives with multiple goals ranging from climate adaptation and mitigation to socio-economic resilience.”
data analysis
The Next Web: COVID-19 made your data set worthless. Now what?
The Next Web: COVID-19 made your data set worthless. Now what?. “The COVID-19 pandemic has perplexed data scientists and creators of machine learning tools as the sudden and major change in consumer behavior has made predictions based on historical data nearly useless. There is also very little point in trying to train new prediction models during the crisis, as one simply cannot predict chaos. While these challenges could shake our perception of what artificial intelligence really is (and is not), they might also foster the development of tools that could automatically adjust.”
Data Theatre: Why the Digital Dashboards of Dominic Cummings may not help with COVID (Martin Robbins)
Martin Robbins: Data Theatre: Why the Digital Dashboards of Dominic Cummings may not help with COVID. “The tech industry is an increasingly metrics- and data-obsessed culture. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: product managers who expose themselves to user research studies and engagement analytics will tend to make smarter decisions, on average, then those who ignore them. The problem, as with any technique or approach, is when data becomes the end rather than the means; when teams and managers start to develop cargo-cult attitudes toward it.”
3 more angles most often used to tell data stories: explorers, relationships and bad data stories (Online Journalism Blog)
Online Journalism Blog: 3 more angles most often used to tell data stories: explorers, relationships and bad data stories . “Yesterday I wrote the first of a two-part series on the 7 angles that are used to tell stories about data. In this second part I finish the list with a look at the three less common angles: those stories focusing on relationships; angles that focus on the data itself — its absence, poor quality, or existence — and exploratory stories that often provide an opportunity to get to the grips with the data itself.”
Phys .org: Big data delivers important new tool in conservation decision making
Phys .org: Big data delivers important new tool in conservation decision making. “The Harry Butler Institute has collaborated with researchers around the world to develop a new tool to inform conservation decisions across Europe. The research is poised to have a direct and immediate impact—on both science and practice.”
Online Journalism Blog: Here are the angles journalists use most often to tell the stories in data
Online Journalism Blog: Here are the angles journalists use most often to tell the stories in data. “In my data journalism teaching and training I often talk about common types of stories that can be found in datasets — so I thought I would take 100 pieces of data journalism and analyse them to see if it was possible to identify how often each of those story angles is used. I found that there are actually broadly seven core data story angles. Many incorporate other angles as secondary dimensions in the storytelling (a change story might go on to talk about the scale of something, for example), but all the data journalism stories I looked at took one of these as its lead.”
ZDNet: Who’s the greatest golfer of all time? This data-led project might have the answer
ZDNet: Who’s the greatest golfer of all time? This data-led project might have the answer. “What do you do if a global pandemic means you can’t stage one of the world’s most famous golf tournaments? For The R&A, organisers of The Open, the answer was to use a combination of data and video to create a virtual tournament of golfing greats from the past 50 years.”
InformationWeek: Why Data Science Isn’t an Exact Science
InformationWeek: Why Data Science Isn’t an Exact Science. “‘When we’re doing data science effectively, we’re using statistics to model the real world, and it’s not clear that the statistical models we develop accurately describe what’s going on in the real world,’ said Ben Moseley, associate professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. ‘We might define some probability distribution, but it isn’t even clear the world acts according to some probability distribution.'”
New York Times: Hoping to Understand the Virus, Everyone Is Parsing a Mountain of Data
New York Times: Hoping to Understand the Virus, Everyone Is Parsing a Mountain of Data. “Six months since the first cases were detected in the United States, more people have been infected by far than in any other country, and the daily rundown of national numbers on Friday was a reminder of a mounting emergency: more than 73,500 new cases, 1,100 deaths and 939,838 tests, as well as 59,670 people currently hospitalized for the virus. Americans now have access to an expanding set of data to help them interpret the coronavirus pandemic.”
Arizona State University: Data analytics can predict global warming trends, heat waves
Arizona State University: Data analytics can predict global warming trends, heat waves. “New research from Arizona State University and Stanford University is augmenting meteorological studies that predict global warming trends and heat waves, adding human-originated factors into the equation.”
Bing Blogs: Extracting Covid-19 insights from Bing search data
Bing Blogs: Extracting Covid-19 insights from Bing search data . “As is true for many other topics, search engine query logs may be able to give insight into the information gaps associated with Covid-19…. We are pleased to announce that we have already made Covid-19 query data freely available on GitHub as the Bing search dataset for Coronavirus intent, with scheduled updates every month over the course of the pandemic. This dataset includes explicit Covid-19 search queries containing terms such as corona, coronavirus, and covid, as well as implicit Covid-19 queries that are used to access the same set of web page search results (using the technique of random walks on the click graph).”
TechCrunch: Aclima and Google release a new air quality data set for researchers to investigate California pollution
TechCrunch: Aclima and Google release a new air quality data set for researchers to investigate California pollution. “As part of the Collision from Home conference, Aclima chief executive Davida Herzl released a new data set made in conjunction with Google. Free to the scientific community, the data is the culmination of four years of data collection and aggregation resulting in 42 million air quality measurements throughout the state of California.”
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis
BetaNews: IBM launches open source tool to help COVID-19 data analysis. “COVID notebooks is designed to help with tasks including obtaining authoritative data on the current status of the outbreak, cleaning up the most serious data-quality problems, collating the data into a format amenable to easy analysis with tools like Pandas and Scikit-Learn, and building an initial set of example reports and graphs.”
Analytics Vidhya: 10+ Simple Yet Powerful Excel Tricks for Data Analysis
Analytics Vidhya: 10+ Simple Yet Powerful Excel Tricks for Data Analysis. “I’ve always admired the immense power of Excel. This software is not only capable of doing basic data computations, but you can also perform data analysis using it. It is widely used for many purposes including the likes of financial modeling and business planning. It can become a good stepping stone for people who are new to the world of business analytics.”
The Atlantic: How Virginia Juked Its COVID-19 Data
The Atlantic: How Virginia Juked Its COVID-19 Data. “The United States’ ability to test for the novel coronavirus finally seems to be improving. As recently as late April, the country rarely reported more than 150,000 new test results each day. The U.S. now routinely claims to conduct more than 300,000 tests a day, according to state-level data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. But these rosy numbers may conceal a problem: A lack of federal guidelines has created huge variation in how states are reporting their COVID-19 data and in what kind of data they provide to the public.”