Recently the Guardian’s Data Blog reported about the results from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in the UK. One of the questions asked in the survey was if the participants had sex in the last four weeks. The results - a summary is available in this info graphic - show that the British have their most sexual active period when they are in their 20s - 40s.
The 100m mean’s sprint finals of the 2012 London Olympics are over and Usain Bolt won the gold medal again with a winning time of 9.63s. Time to compare the result with my forecast of 9.68s, posted on 22 July.
My simple log-linear model predicted a winning time of 9.68s with a prediction interval from 9.39s to 9.97s. Well, that is of course a big interval of more than half a second, or ±3%.
It is less than a week before the 2012 Olympic games will start in London. No surprise therefore that the papers are all over it, including a lot of data and statistics around the games.
The Economist investigated the potential financial impact on sponsors (some benefits), tax payers (no benefits) and the athletes (if they are lucky) in its recent issue
The Guardian has awhole series around the Olympics, including the data of all Summer Olympic Medallists since 1896.
The Guardian published a nice summary and link collection of an interdisciplinary visualisation workshop hosted by Microsoft dedicated to visualising probability and risk. Check it out <a 19="" 2012="" apr="" datablog="" href-“http:=”" href="" news="" visualising-risk-microsoft-conference“=”" www.guardian.co.uk="">here.
OECD better life index
The links I found most interesting were those to the pages of Gregor Aisch and Moritz Stefaner. You may have come across their work in the past, as Moritz worked on the OECD better life index and Gregor contributed to the Where does my money go site.
I had mentioned the Guardian’s data blog and the need for more data journalism earlier here. What I really like about the Guardian’s approach in particular is that they share the data of their articles and encourage readers to use it. Of course there are perfectly valuable reasons for only displaying a chart and not making the underlying data available, e.g. to generate leads, as potential customers may get in touch with you asking for the underlying data, or technology issues that don’t allow you to upload data, etc.
We need more data journalism. How else will we find the nuggets of data and information worth reading?
Life should become easier for data journalists, as the Guardian, one of the data journalism pioneers, points out in this article about the new open data initiative of the European Union (EU). The aims of the EU’s open data strategy are bold. Data is seen as the new gold of the digital age.