Data Visualization & Open data

Via Ivan Begtin

The bane of bad patents is well known throughout the software world, but a new study from MIT’s Heidi L. William looks at the cost of patents on genomic data, using the race t0 map the human genome as a rare case study.

Carolyn Y. Johnson has a great write-up of the study, and raises the regular argument: That biomedical research needs long patent lives to get funded, and that public research removes the financial motivation, decreasing breakthroughs.

The study found almost the opposite, however, when it came to research done on two sets of genetic data: The first set was done by a publicly-funded team that released all of its data freely, while the second set was created by private company Celera, which allowed academic use but required licensing agreements for wider distribution and product development.

Interestingly, the study had the opportunity to look at the long-term impact patents had even when the information’s patent eventually lapsed, and the results were surprising.

Via Irina Radchenko

The Digital Marketing Budgets infographic from 6smarketing.com is a digital marketing calculator to help businesses determine what they should be allocating marketing in 2012.

 

Below are statistics 6S Marketing uncovered during research to determine what percentage of marketing budgets organizations are currently allocating towards digital marketing, and what we can expect to see digital marketing budgets to look like in 2012. We’ve also created an infographic to illustrate these, and a digital marketing calculator to help businesses determine what they should be allocating to digital marketing in 2012.

SEO and social media marketing currently make up 70% of online marketing budgets. Overall, 24% of budgets were spent on digital marketing in 2011. Although the percentage of budgets that include online marketing tactics increase every year, 28% of organizations are in the process of moving their marketing budgets to digital channels.

 

There are some great charts, a great color scheme and really valuable information in this infographic, and I love that they included a number of different chart styles.  However, it stumbles with a number of the data visualizations that don’t match the data.  Accuracy is the most important aspect of infographic design, because when you mess up visualizing the data your overall design loses credibility.

 

The circular bar chart in the first section has text values of 64%, but the visualization is showing a value close to 85%.  In the Ad Spending grid of 100 Circles, the data shown in text is 20%, but only 8% is colored red in the data visualization.  In the final Mobile Ad Spending circular bar chart at the end of the infographic, I can’t see any correlation between the numbers and the chart.

Via Russ Merz, Ph.D., massimo facchinetti

OpenGov Diagram by Armel Le Coz & Cyril Lage (from Democratie Ouverte). thanks to Samuel Goëta (Open Knowledge Foundation France) for translation.

Via Ivan Begtin

Alex Howard has written an excellent article over at the O'Reilly Radar listing eight business models forgovernment open data, a handy list for those in government agencies attempting to justify to senior management or Ministers why releasing government data is important and valuable.

The models listed in Alex's article, Open data economy: Eight business models for open data and insight from Deloitte UK, were identified by Michele Osella, a researcher and business analyst in the Business Model & Policy Innovation Unit at the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella in Italy.

Via Irina Radchenko

Learn Big Data technologies like Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, HBase, MapReduce, JAQL, Pig,
Flume, ZooKeeper, Mahout, Streams, and others. Big Data University offers free online courses taught by the leading
experts in the field.

Via Irina Radchenko

Via Cátedra Libre Open Gov (CLOG), Ivan Begtin

Open States is a collection of tools that make it possible for citizens to track what is happening in their state's capitol by aggregating information from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

Using the site is simple: enter a U.S. address or select a state to start to research bills, review voting records, contact elected officials and more. Check out this Sunlight Academy tutorial to see how Open States can help citizens, journalists and activists learn more about their state government.

Open States is a project of the Sunlight Foundation. Thank you to the Rita Allen Foundation, Minnesota Historical Society and Open Society Foundations for their generous support.

Additionally, collecting this data would not be possible without the support of a community much larger than the team here at Sunlight. A special thanks to all of our volunteer contributors and the authors and maintainers of all of the libraries that we depend upon.

Via Irina Radchenko

By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.

Via Complexity Digest

Originally posted on on 22 March 2013 on OpeningParliament.org
During

Via Ivan Begtin

Learn Big Data technologies like Hadoop, HDFS, Hive, HBase, MapReduce, JAQL, Pig,
Flume, ZooKeeper, Mahout, Streams, and others. Big Data University offers free online courses taught by the leading
experts in the field.

Via Irina Radchenko