OUseful: Data Referenced Journalism and the Media – Still a Long Way to Go Yet?
Monday, 7 November 2011, 11:22
Tony Hirst: “we need data press officers as well as data journalists. Their job would be to put together the tools that support the data churnalist in taking the raw data and producing statistical charts and interpretation from it. Just like the minist…
SchoolBook: An Introduction to SchoolBook’s Data
Thursday, 8 September 2011, 18:30
"The goal: to curate the thousands of public records available about schools in New York City, simplify and standardize their contents, and make it all as easy as possible to understand and compare school to school. … As you can see on any schoo…
Flowing Data: Statistics has a new name
Friday, 29 July 2011, 16:28
"A natural reaction to statistics, even among some statisticians, is that once you graduate you either go into research or you work as a number-crunching monkey. If that's your thing, go for it with gusto, but if not, there's a lot of op…
BBC News: Local spending survey blocked by government
Thursday, 12 May 2011, 12:33
"The BBC's attempts to collate this spending data largely avoided some obstacles placed in the way of alternative research being carried out by other media. … Local Government Chronicle (LGC) was pursuing a similar survey. But it appears to…
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Upper-income people still don’t realize they’re upper-income
Thursday, 21 April 2011, 10:07
Poll data suggests many rich people can't place themselves accurately on the US income distribution: "30 percent of these upper-income people say that upper-income people pay too little [tax], but only 6 percent say that they personally pay t…
Online Journalism Blog: Data journalism stats time: seasonal adjustment
Thursday, 18 November 2010, 12:57
"When you start to base journalism around data it’s easy to overlook basic weaknesses in that data – from the type of average that is being used, to distribution, sample size and statistical significance. [One] factor to consider when looking at any figures is seasonal adjustment."
Your Right to Know: Hidden High Court Injunctions
Saturday, 17 October 2009, 09:53
Heather Brooke: "It is bad enough that superinjunctions exist at all, but it is absolutely appalling that there are not even records kept of how often they are used. Pressure needs to be put on the High Court to record these occasions, and make the details public as a matter of urgency."
McGuire on Media: Musings on newspapers, journalism and innovation
Saturday, 8 November 2008, 10:14
"[T]he phenomenon of Nate Silver and his remarkable web site Fivethirtyeight. Editors and news directors who think this is the tale of another interesting geek are missing the point. This is journalism pushing the boundaries. Silver has taken his baseball statistics skills and applied them to polls and political news. His inquiry methods are different than we’ve known, but they produce stunning and insightful journalism. Once again, I am concerned and disturbed that Silver and his partner Seth Quinn developed their innovative approach outside a mainstream media newsroom."
Chase Davis: Applying Benford’s Law to CAR
Monday, 13 October 2008, 07:54
"In case you missed it at IRE Miami this year, Phil Meyer and Steve Doig put on a great panel about techniques reporters could and should be applying, but, for whatever reason, are not. One of the techniques Meyer mentioned is known as Benford's Law — a decades-old mathematical rule that forensic accountants have recently used to spot fraud by examining the distribution of individual digits in large dataset…"
The plural of anecdote is not data — even when it’s ‘crowdsourced’
Tuesday, 11 March 2008, 18:05
I really like what the Times does online, but I must say that Roy Greenslade’s analysis of today’s Times splash is right on the money.
It doesn’t take university-level stats to know that self-selecting samples cannot be extrapolated to populations. An online vote touted as “a new kind of interactive poll” is no different than the sort of phone-in vote that papers have run for years.
It’s a very clever way of creating a very big collection of anecdotes, but to call it a “poll”, interactive or not, is misleading.
My favourite bit (in the printed editon) was this: “The poll, which attracted 2,476 responses, is novel because it reflects not just hard statistical data, but people’s observations and anxieties about the state of the economy”.
Eh? “Hard statistical data”? Where? Methinks the “just” was superfluous.
Further down (in a tiny boxout at the foot of the jump on page 4) communities editor Tom Whitwell provides the disclaimer that should have been right up in paragraph two — the story “does not have the statistical rigour of an opinion poll”.
The Times isn’t the first newspaper to report its online votes as if they were some sort of survey, of course. But to sacrifice the intellectual rigour of a story for the sake of fostering online “community” or experimenting with “crowdsourcing” is a very strange set of journalistic priorities indeed.
I wonder how many letters will flood in tomorrow from the Royal Statistical Society and various OxBridge dons.
Friday, 7 March 2008, 18:09
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"Google Analytics Industry Benchmarking will let users opt-in to share and have access to aggregate traffic info for websites in their industry vertical and at other points in their supply chain."
Tuesday, 22 January 2008, 22:43
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"Now, says Sifry, Technorati indexes 112 million blogs, with 120 thousand new ones appearing each day. And that’s not including spam blogs [which now] account for—get this—well over 99% of all the pings and updates pouring into Technorati’s server
Monday, 17 December 2007, 00:21
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"In what is believed to be the first statistical analysis of player performance for those named in the 409-page report, the Journal Sentinel … found …"
Monday, 26 November 2007, 17:04
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Tim O’Reilly promotes mathematical literacy with a discussion of trends in major websites’ traffic growth.
