Tasty Data Goodies

Everyone loves charts.  Whether you're a manager putting together a presentation, a student researching stats on world health or an advanced data analyst, you can't deny the simple beauty of a chart to help you visualize and understand data.

PBS presents Sid the Science Kid, who playfully reminds us just how "sweet" charts are as "handy, dandy scientific tools."

Following the first Presidential debate that took place Friday evening, Obama and McCain both launched ads targeting their opposing candidate's choice of words.

Early Saturday morning, Obama's campaign released an ad criticizing McCain for failing to say "middle class."  Obama managed to mention the "middle class" three times during the debate on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign released an Internet video citing occasions where Obama said that he agreed with McCain's positions.  Obama said the word "agree" five times during the debate; he also said "disagree" three times.  McCain also criticized Obama for not using the word "victory" in reference to Iraq.  McCain said the word "victory" twice and referred to the consequences of "defeat" ten times.

Here's a closer look at what the candidates were talking about using some nifty data visualizations:

Total word count:
Obama: 7,657
McCain: 7,197

Wordle clouds:

Frequently used words:

Even in the aftermath of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco at Merrill Lynch, John Thain signed on with a compensation package that totaled almost $83.8 million, making him the highest paid chief executive in America.

Overall, the financial industry annually pays their CEOs small fortunes.  The heads of four financial companies -- John Thain of Merrill Lynch, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs ($54m), Kenneth Chenault of American Express ($50.1m), and John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley ($41.4m) -- were among the five highest paid CEOs in research conducted by NY Times and Equilar.

This graph shows the total compensation awarded to the 10 highest paid CEOs in 2007.  Total compensation includes: base salary, cash bonus, perks/other comp., stock awards, and option awards.

In April 2008, the NY Times reported, "The chiefs of the 10 largest financial service firms were awarded a combined total of $320 million last year, even though the firms reported mortgage-related losses that totaled 55 billion and wiped out more than 200 billion in shareholder value." 

Now, as debate swirls around the $700 billion dollar bailout plan, congress is deciding if companies should be allowed to give "golden parachutes" to executives and establish rules to revoke bonuses awarded on bogus claims. They are also looking into the possibility of putting a cap on executive pay.

Is what you're reading online true, false, or somewhere in between?

The Internet has done wonders in terms of making information accessible to people all over the world. Today, bloggers, citizen reporters, and even members of the Swivel community are responsible for adding to the so-called data deluge.  As more and more people pump information online, should we be asking the question: how much of it is actually reliable?

To determine which blogs are more trustworthy, Technorati assigns each one an "authority number".  The more people that link to a blog, the higher the number.  Of 4,969,251 blogs, more than 75,000 have an authority number of 50 or more, which means that at least 50 other people found their blog worth linking to.

At Swivel, data that comes from our Official Sources, such as OECD or WHO, is branded with an official source badge to let our users know that the data is coming from a reliable source.  Swivel members can also link back to a data source for added credibility.  Of the 13,138 data sets on Swivel (as of 9/23/08), 9,049 have been uploaded by the Swivel community and 4,087 have been uploaded by official sources.

While both systems have their benefits and flaws, a number or a badge can only tell you so much. In the end it's really up to you to weed out what's valuable from what's rubbish.

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One of our advisors, Charley Kyd, recently suggested we check out a book about communicating with pictures called Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam.

Today, on Dan's blog, there is a story that is at the heart of the US presidential campaign.

Regardless of one's politics, it's an interesting use of pictures and data to create a compelling narrative.

A few active Swivelers have recently requested that we make it easier to track what people are saying about the data at Swivel. So, we created a new feature on the home page that shows the last few comments.

Or you can click on the comments link to check out all the commentary. You can also keep track of comments through your blog reader by subscribing to the comments rss feed.

Happy Swiveling.

Though we're a bunch of data nerds here at Swivel, we still talk about the same things as everybody else. Recently, the elections have captured our interest.

Perhaps unlike most people, we at Swivel like to watch the drama unfold in the data.

We monitor news and media attention with Google Trends and Nielsen's BlogPulse.

And we track the results of the changes in media attention with Gallup polls and Intrade elections futures.

Hat tip to Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media for the inspiration for this post.

Last week Swivel ventured to the Anchor Steam Brewery for a tour and a little tasting. It was a nice break to get out of the office for the day.  Even though we were away from our desks, we couldn't help but soak up all the data tidbits Anchor Steam had to offer.

We learned that Anchor Steam likes to keep it local.  They brew and bottle all their beer in one San Francisco location.  They only use SF Municipal tap water and they ferment their beer at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, which is also the average temperature of the city by the bay.

The brewery's signature beer, Anchor Steam, makes up 70 percent of their sales, while their other six brews make up the remaining 30 percent.

And, being the data nerds that we are, here is a graph of the alcohol content in each kind of Anchor Steam brew.  Old Foghorn packs 8 to 10 percent. Woohoo.

Symptoms of this infectious disease include: hyperventilation while watching Michael Phelps break record after record; headaches resulting from frequent squinting as you try to keep up with Usain Bolt in the 100M dash; and pain or discomfort knowing that female athletes, Constantina Tomescu-Dita and Dara Torres, hovering around the 40 year mark, are ten times more in shape than you'll ever be. (Any of these or may not be impacted by Beijing's air quality.)

Swivelers have definitely caught the Olympic fever!  In the last couple weeks, we have seen data sets tracking everything from the history of drug testing to Michael Phelps' gold medal tally. This chart from seancarmody tracks the total number of gold, silver, and bronze medals won by country.  Keep checking back for updates.

We would love to hear more about your favorite Olympic athletes or events!  Comment here or upload your data to Swivel.