Releasing data really works, Part III

More and more free data are available that are quality-controlled and verifiable. Guardian Data Blog's @smfrogers (now at Twitter) was quite sanguine about this:

Comment is free, but facts are sacred

"The shots heard around the world"

Recent mass shootings in the US and elsewhere affect me in a particular way: My parents grew up in Nazi then Soviet occupied Pest, on the east shore of the Danube overlooked by the Buda Castle (dark green below), from which guns fired down streets perpendicular to the river (grey at right below), so residents literally ran the gauntlet across those streets, and friends of my parents lost a babe in arms from a stray bullet; my parents thus emigrated just before my birth to give me a better life, but that included six months in Algiers during a revolution where I too witnessed two fatalities early 1961.

Illustrative maps in current affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

The Data section of British paper The Guardian is a great example of illustrating reams of data and helping readers make sense of it - such maps are only illustrations, not exacting science as in my previous post - readers wish to grasp trends for tabular data by country, rather than examine their exact geographies.

Another Take on Climate Change, Part IV

[Update: Part V, more on polar wanderings]

From guardian.co.uk today: Goce satellite maps the Earth's gravity in unprecedented precision. Aside from updating on Part III of this series, this slots right into my comment on the lesser-know fact that the earth wobbles on it axis, and that mass plate-tectonic movements are the result as well as the cause of earth tremors along plate boundaries

Time, place and social networks

Last week saw the feverish conclusion of the award of the 2016 Olympic host city. One key factor reported by the Guardian was the following (numbers appear to be from summer and winter Olympics):