John W Rodat

Use ALL the Damn Data

March 30, 2011 Economics

Follow the trail here. It’s only barely polite, if that. But the issues are important. The issues are what should our economic policy be and the honesty in data analysis. John Taylor is a professor of Economics at Stanford. In mid-January, he posted an analysis, Higher Investment Best Way to Reduce Unemployment, Recent Experience Shows […]

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Quote of the Day

March 24, 2011 Camps

Sarah Hartley of the Guardian posted a couple days ago in Data expert moves on from ‘telephone journalism’ and quoted Francis Irving saying: In the end we’ll no more talk about data journalism than we talk now about telephone journalism. Irving has a successful track record of using the web to provide the public with […]

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Visualized Budget Data for the UK

March 23, 2011 Budget

Even a cursory view suggests to me that the Guardian has been making extra efforts at using data and visualized data at that in their reporting. You’ll find them particularly at their Datablog. Here’s their story on five key data sets in the latest budget. One graphic in particular stood out for me and that […]

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County Spending Animated

March 22, 2011 Expenditures

Per capita expenditures animated by county (excluding the five counties of New York City). (Flash required.)NYS County Expend per Capita 1998-2009.swf. Experiment with the scales, speed and labeling.

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More on New York County Finances, and Not Just Nassau

March 21, 2011 Budget

A few days ago, we looked at debt in New York counties (excluding New York City). We found that using several debt measures such as debt per county resident, Nassau County, which is in budgetary trouble, is an outlier. But of course, there are many other things that we might look at and the most […]

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Visualizing Concentration of Historical Events

March 21, 2011 Geography

Gareth Lloyd, a software engineer at the BBC and Tom Martin pulled Wikipedia events that have geographical coordinates and did a neat, animated, historical visualization. Using Google Fusion and Maps, they also did a heat map. Lloyd and Martin did this for History Hackday. Is it biased? Sure, by whatever biases have accumulated in Wikipedia, […]

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Peanut, Peanut Butter

March 21, 2011 Economics

Too much of economics is pure theory with no data. Take a look at James Hamilton’s commentary at Econobrowser on a paper by Chevalier and Kashyap. The authors actually used grocery store price data. What variability is hidden behind national economic data?

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For openers … the case of Nassau County, New York

March 17, 2011 Local Government

It’s bad enough when we don’t bother gathering data to assess where we are, how we’re doing, and where we going. But to gather data and not use it is both foolish and wasteful. Not making governmental data – the public’s data – available to the public in a usable form undermines our ability to […]

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