Dog Names and Breeds

I love data. As an Economist and Professor you sometimes find yourself with interesting datasets that need to be shared. I have a group of students doing a project for a dog daycare in town. In order to survey dog owners we got the list of dog licenses from the county. It has the name, address of the owner, and the name, sex and breed of the dog. Below we have the top 20 names for dogs in La Crosse County for 2012. Remember these are licensed dogs.

Below I have the top 20 breeds from La Crosse.

What Not To Do

A great example of how not to design and deliver a presentation. In this commercial Microsoft demonstrates why they suck, or at the very least why their Ad Agency sucks.

Worldbank Data Visualizer

Another Data visualizer.

World Statistics Day

In case you missed it, yesterday - 20/10/2010 - was World Statistics Day.

Psychologists and Economists

We are very different types of social scientists. Seth Roberts does a good job of discussing how our approaches to data differ:

5. Psychologists rarely use observational data at all. To get them to appreciate sophisticated analysis of observational data is like getting someone who has never drunk any wine to appreciate the difference between a $20 wine and a $40 wine.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: BP Edition.

BP is busted lying with charts.

Linkfest

1. The future is here, and it involves analyzing data. In this case, predicting movements with cell phones.

2. An awesome visualization, well audio-ization of the time differences in Olympic sports.

3. The problems with the GOP.

4. The challenges facing employment growth.

Viz Wars

Better Data

We need better data.

The shortcomings of the data-gathering system came through loud and clear here Friday and Saturday at a first-of-its-kind gathering of economists from academia and government determined to come up with a more accurate statistical picture.


The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for. A carburetor bought for $50 in China as a component of an American-made car, for example, more often than not shows up in the statistics as if it were the American-made version valued at, say, $100. The failure to distinguish adequately between what is made in America and what is made abroad falsely inflates the gross domestic product, which sums up all value added within the country.


American workers lose their jobs when carburetors they once made are imported instead. The federal data notices the decline in employment but fails to revalue the carburetors or even pinpoint that they are foreign-made. Because it seems as if $100 carburetors are being produced but fewer workers are needed to do so, productivity falsely rises — in the national statistics.


“We don’t have the data collection structure to capture what is happening in a real time way, or what is being traded and how it is affecting workers,” said Susan Houseman, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich., who has done pioneering research in the field. “We have no idea how to measure the occupations being offshored or what is being inshored.”

Another Data Mashup

Another tool to mashup data.

Wolfram Alpha

Progress. Wolfram Alpha. One step towards the dream of instantly accessible data.

Google Data

Want to see the current unemployment rate for La Crosse plotted against previous observations? Simply type "unemployment rate la crosse" into google and the first hit will produce a google chart. Or hit the link here.

Hat tip: Lifehacker.