The help system on my Leopard installation has lost track of most of its help files. Even the Help help can’t help:
The ol’ Repair Permissions trick to fix this didn’t work, and a quick Goog came up empty, too. Anyone out there know what to do?
Today my good friend Todd pointed me to Swivel, apparently being touted as “YouTube for data”.
Seems promising, although most of the datasets are vanishingly small, and too “munged” — not raw enough for reanalysis. For instance, there seems to be a lot of stuff like this:
Billion Dollar Climate and Weather Diasasters, 1980-2006
which comes straight off a website and is already heavily processed. To their credit, you can download their technical paper on this analysis, but it’s scant on methodology and the source data is unavailable.
I guess there’s value in trying to centralize all of these bits of data, analyzed or not, and the already-analyzed stuff is of course far more interesting:
average trans fat in grams by fast food restaurant
But still: where’s the everyone-can-edit part, like Wikipedia? It’s one thing to be able to leave a comment, but the strength of this site could be the ability for those knowledgeable in data analysis, a subject area, or both to come in, review, and actually correct or reinterpret the data. Letting people simply throw up whatever crap they happen to believe could make the problem of data-and-statistics misuse even worse, because there will be no way to evaluate the findings.
I can’t wait to see what Edward Tufte has to say about this.
Update 13 nov 11:46a GMT+1:
I checked out the Swivel blog and (unsurprisingly) it gave me a better idea of the creators’ vision. And some cool links, too, to other data-related sites.
That’s who I really look like (or used to, much to my eternal shame). Who the heck are these people?
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