You have done such a good job working with visualizing data. And, then, I saw that the folks at Google had developed their own tool.
So, this week, I want you to play with it and then write a two-paragraph reflection on what you did, what you learned, and what you think might make it even better.
You can work with the tool here:
Google Public Data Explorer
This work is due by Friday, May 14th.
Monday, May 10, 2010
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18 comments:
I thought the google data visualizations were really cool. I visualized a few data sets and then came to US population from Jul, 1980 to Jul, 2009. The first three sates with the largest populations were (in order) California, Texas and New York. Wyoming was the state with the smallest population in within the 29 years. I was really surprised that California had 13,293,900 people enlarge their population in 29 years. That's an average of about 1,274 people per day.
What I also did with my visualization was look at the different ways it was displayed. The one I liked the second best was the one of the map. This was cool, because it gave you a google earth picture of USA and showed a bubble over each state. The bubble was sized based on the population of the state it was on. Then, if you zoomed in, it would act as google earth. Another thing I found cool about this data set was that in this whole data set, I am one of those 307,006,550 persons. And so are you, and so is the rest of the class, and town, and state. That is why this data set struck me that most.
I thought that the Google public data explorer was not very good. The many eyes website had much more data and the data on the Google site was very limited. A good thing about this site is the way you can visualize the data in different formats. By clicking on a little globe icon it shows the data on a Google earth map. The small amount of data they have now has a few interesting data sets. I looked at the data set for STD s (sexually transmitted diseases) in America. I choose this data set because I did an organism research project on AIDS recently. When I tried to use the globe visualization and zoomed in, an error message popped up stating “no maps at this zoom level.”
I also looked at minimum wage in Europe. I used all the visualizations and some were misleading and unclear, but some were very easy to read. Overall I do not like this site, it has limited data sets and it is basically a second rate version of the many eyes website. This site has a limited amount of visualizing options. This site could be improved like adding more data sets, more options to visualize and be a bit more innovative. I am surprised because I happen to like Google a lot and they are usually ahead of the game.
I looked at the minimum wage from Europe. I changed different ways to view it, and I looked at all of the settings, and saw what would change if I pressed on each one.I thought that it was really cool, and that the best looking way to show the data was to have it as a map. I thought that that was the most fun. I learned that you can't use any way that you would like to show the data, it has to be appropriate for the data. So then I figured out that the best way to show the data was to have it in a bar graph. With the data like this, I could easily see all of the countries. And I could also easily see what all of the amounts are.
I thought that there should be two things. First, I think that there should be more datasets, there aren't very many, and I think that more people may use it if there were more. Secondly, I think that there should be a way to make your own datasets. I think that would also help with having more datasets. Or if there is a way to make one, Google should make that more clear. I liked that better in the IBM visualizations, you could make your own, even using existing data. You could also search for datasets, and there would be so many of them to chose from. But with the actual data, and how they showed it, I thought that that was good, maybe better than the IBM site.
I looked at population in the U.S. It was about the population in each state. First I made it a graph with multiple circles, which I liked because you could zoom, but then I choose a bar graph because I thought it was easier to view the data that way. I thought it was really interesting data. Then I looked at the populations of each state and compared them with each other.
I learned that even though Wyoming is bigger then Rhode Island, Rhode Island had 508,939 more people then Wyoming in July 2009. I also learned that New York has the 2nd highest population until April 1994, then New York has the 3rd highest population. I also noticed that the District of Columbia actually lost people, instead of gaining them. Most of the states increased in population, not decreased. I think to make this better they could have compared the states to other countries or continents. I think you should have had more choices when viewing the data.
I looked at the unemployment rate chart. It showed the unemployment rate in different states in the U.S. According to this chart, California had the biggest unemployment rate. I think this is because California has the biggest population, therefore having the biggest unemployment rate. From what I saw, North Dakota had the smallest unemployment rate. When I looked at New York, I saw that it had one of the big unemployment rates.
One thing that I think can be improved is to have more types of data, like the average money a household spends a year in each state. Other than that, I thought that this was pretty interesting. I liked how on the chart that I looked at the map had the bubbles to show the rates.
I picked the U.S Population data to play with. I found out that California has the greatest population(36.9 million, when New York has the second biggest population(19.5 million). I also found that some states have REALLY low numbers, for instance, Hawaii has a population of 1.2 million!!! And even more, the District of Columbia has a population of only around 600,000 pepole!!! So sad!!! ANyway, I thought the whole thing was really cool and fun to do. I hope we can do it again!!!
BYE!!!
I clicked on population of America. As of now it is at three hundred and seven million. It has gone up over one hundred and fifty million since the year 1980. Since 1980 it has really been speeding up or slowing down but is growing on a very solid record. What I mean by that is that about every five years it goes up about thirty million.
I also looked at the population of NY, California, and Texas. California was ranked number one with a population of thirty-seven million. The state with the second highest population was Texas with a population of about twenty-five million, just a few million more than NY. I though this was really cool because I had never seen the population of states alone compared to the entire US.
My data set is called Gonorhea in males from 1984-2008:http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z79r63l7auplt5_&ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=count&hl=en&dl=en#ctype=l&strail=false&nselm=h&met_y=rate&fdim_y=disease:280&fdim_y=gender:M&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=state&tdim=true&hl=en&dl=en
I looked at the data set of the STD of Gonorrhea in males. This showed the incidence rate of Gonorrhea from 1984 to 2008. In this data set I saw that all of the United States dropped drastically from 1984 to 1996. It went from 439 to 125 in 11 years.
I learned that a lot of people get sexually transmitted diseases even now. I have also learned that less males of the US have Gonorrhea then in 1984. When I saw this I thought that maybe we have gotten more medication to help with this disease. If this is the case, then I am very proud of my country in having safe sex, and learning new medicines to cure diseases. I think that people of my generation would have more sex, unprotected, but I was wrong according to this data set. Maybe I underestimated my thought about the United States. This data set helped me understand better about my country and about changes throughout about 20 years.
I decided to play with unemployment rates in the U.S beginning in 2008. I enjoyed how the data was set up. There was a side bar of all the states and you could click on them and it would give you the unemployment rate of that state. I saw that California has the highest unemployment rate. This is probably because of California's high population and jobs are hard to come by. Also I noticed that states that were on the coast had a relatively high unemployment rate. States in the middle of the country had lower unemployment rates, perhaps because those states aren’t heavily populated.
I really enjoyed googles public data explorer. I'm not sure whether I like these better then many eyes. I personally found the Google version easier to work. Many eyes were a bit difficult to work at first but I found that once I knew how to use it, it was simply just better then the Google version. I would definitely use both of these data websites for they both contain intriguing information for me to observe.
As I was about to post my article I realized that someone else. I just wanted to say that I did not copy their topic. Thank you.
I need to reword the last part of my article.
As I was about to post my article I realized that someone else was doing me same topic. I hope it’s alright that we're both doing the same topic.
I looked at the unemployment rate in the U.S. over the past 60 years. I learned that the state/territory with the highest unemployment is Puerto Rico and the lowest is in North Dakota. Anyway, I found this information rather intriguing. Its sad to know how far up the unemployment rate went. It hasn't been this high in a very long time. Right now, across America is the highest unemployment rate we’ve had since 1983.
I really liked how I could visualize this information on a line graph. I found it odd how Rhode Island had the second largest unemployment rate in the U.S. because of its size, although I know this was done by percentage and not depending on population, but even still I was kind of shocked by some of the results. But this data was very cool to discover.
I looked at the data set pertaining to the monthly unemployment rate in the European Union for men and women. According to the data set, men have had a lower unemployment rate by about 2% from 2000 through to July 2008. In July of 2008 the unemployment rates start to even out until men are higher. I wonder why that is.
I really liked this data set because I know that the unemployment rate in the USA is up, but I never really stopped to consider the Europeans. It is good to know their unemployment rate because sometimes we just focus on ourselves but this made me really see that it isn't just us, it's everyone. I was a little disappointed that it only went up to 2009, I think they should have tried to predict the next couple of months at least and added it. Also, I'd like to know why the numbers changed so much as to put men higher when all those years they had a lower one.
I really liked this. I looked at the life expectancy at birth, total (years). Some things that I thought were really interesting in this data was that in Belarus the life expectancy was going up in the 1960 and went down in 1995 and 2000 which I thought was really interesting because all the other countries went up when the time was going up but this went down. Another thing that I thought was interesting was that Australia had the highest life expectancy, I was not sure why it had that but I looked it up and it said that Australia has all the new technology to have babies like pro.
I think that some things that could make it better is that it could have a little back round information on what we are learning about. For example it could say Australia has the highest life expectancy at birth because it has a lot of technology to make it really easy.
I really liked this. I looked at the life expectancy at birth, total (years). Some things that I thought were really interesting in this data was that in Belarus the life expectancy was going up in the 1960 and went down in 1995 and 2000 which I thought was really interesting because all the other countries went up when the time was going up but this went down. Another thing that I thought was interesting was that Australia had the highest life expectancy, I was not sure why it had that but I looked it up and it said that Australia has all the new technology to have babies like pro.
I think that some things that could make it better is that it could have a little back round information on what we are learning about. For example it could say Australia has the highest life expectancy at birth because it has a lot of technology to make it really easy.
I really enjoyed this week's blog work. While I found many elements of this website interesting a few things stuck out in my mind. The first was the way the datas were organized. First you were brought to a list of somewhat broad topics, and then when you clicked on a topic the website brought you to a list of narrowed down topics, or topics that have to do with the first topic you clicked on (for example, I clicked on Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in Europe, and four suggestions for related data sets came up). I also noticed that not all of the data sets had more than one data set per broad category.
One data set I found interesting was Road Fatalities per 1 million inhabitants. I thought this was interesting because in the 1980s-1990s fatalities were high, but ending in 2005, road fatalities seemed to slow, or go down per 1 million people. Most of the countries shown in this data had similar trends in their road fatality rates, high in the 1980s-90s, and then lowering in 2000-2005. I think this is because in 2000-2005 the world really became aware of the dangers of not wearing seat belts and talking on the phone while driving. I know that in the U.S. the "click it or ticket" rule was strongly enforced (at least in NY state) during this time, so I think that during this time the world was coming to terms with the threats of driving.
One thing that I think could be improved or added to this data is the current road fatalities. I am interested to know this because in recent years, texting while driving has become a large problem. I would like to see by how much the road fatalities are effected because of this issue.
This is what I did for the blog. I played around with a graph on cancer cases in America. The graph was the cases between 1999 to 2005. The graph was strange from1999 to 2000 cancer rate went slightly down. Then from 2000 to 2004 it hugely increased. Then from 2004 to 2005 cancer cases stayed the same.
There was some things I learned doing this blog. I learned there was a lot more cancer cases in the world then I thought. I also learned in a graph a tiny slim can mean 10,000. If I had to make some changes I would say why things are changing. Because I was rather curios why the graph went down, up, and then stayed the same.
I thought that the data visualization were very limited and not very interesting. I visualized some sets of data but analyzed some more then others. I think that the many eyes data was had more information. I think that the Google public data explorer was a lot easier to understand how to make the different visualization. One of the visualization I looked at was the number of cancer cases in the different states. When I looked at it on the bar graph I saw the huge range from California to Alaska. I thought that was probably because more population means more chances of people having cancer.
I was shocked by the difference of people who get cancer from ages 10-14 and ages 50-54. In both age ranges the country with the most cases was California. For the cancer cases for the 10-14 year olds was 383 and for the 50-54 year olds it was 11,521. I think that something that could make it even better would be if they had more data that could be played around with it was very limited and not very interesting. I think that if they broaden there information it could make the web site much more interesting.
I was looking at a chart showing the unemployment rate of the U.S. on map. From 1990 to 2010, North Dakota had the smallest unemployment rate. California had the largest. Texas, New York, and Florida also have a very big unemployment rate.
They visualization was very clear. You could very easily see what states had a big or small employment rate.
I think that they don't have enough data and visualizations. There was not much of a selection so more of a variety would have made it better.
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