jbg

think statistics are boring, irrelevant and hard to understand? well, think again.

two examples of visually displaying important information in an amazingly cool way:

snapshots

territory size shows the proportion of all people living on less than or equal to US$1 in purchasing power parity a day.
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gapminder, global evolution, globalization, hans rosling, human development, inequality, mark newman, on line tools, poverty, state of the world, statistics, visualization, worldmapper

Some of the stuff I do all week…

Complex Networks

Visualizing a shareholder network:

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The Firefox add-on Gspace allows you to use Gmail as a file server:
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Because technological advancement is mostly quite gradual, one hardly notices it creeping into ones life. Only if you would instantly remove these high tech commodities, you’d realize how dependent one has become.
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Confused about the climate? Not sure what’s happening? Exaggerated fears or impending cataclysm?

A good place to start is a publication by Swiss Re. It is done in a straightforward, down-to-earth, no-bullshit and sane manner. The source to the whole document is given at the bottom.
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Scaling-law relations characterize an immense number of natural processes, prominently in the form of

1. scaling-law distributions,
2. scale-free networks,
3. cumulative relations of stochastic processes.

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National Geographic`s July 2007 edition: Swarm Theory

A single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems.

In 1881 a result was published, based on the observation that the first pages of logarithm books, used at that time to perform calculations, were much more worn than the other pages. The conclusion was that computations of numbers that started with 1 were performed more often than others: if d denotes the first digit of a number the probability of its appearance is equal to log(d + 1).
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There is an interesting observation or conjecture to be made from the Mataphysics Map in the post what can we know?, concerning the nature of infinity.
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introduction

medical studies often contradict each other. results claiming to have “proven” some causal connection are confronted with results claiming to have “disproven” the link, or vice versa. this dilemma affects even reputable scientists publishing in leading medical journals. (more…)