Data geek heaven
Via Kameron at Brutal Woman, I found this presentation on how much of what we think we know about "the third world" is wrong. Specifically, it points out how much Asia and, to a lesser degree, South America have converged with Europe and Northern America with respect to factors like infant mortality and life expectancy, leaving Africa behind. But the use of graphics is the attention getter.
So, I was quite pleased to discover that the data tool, gapminder, that Rosling uses is now available for anyone to play with. You can pick from a bunch of pre-loaded data sets, and the site promises that there will eventually be the ability to add your own data. Data geek heaven.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone know if there’s a way to condition the color of a bar in an Excel bar graph on the value of a boolean value of another data series? I wound up doing it by hand for the presentation I was working on today, but there ought to be a way to it automatically?
July 15th, 2007 at 9:26 am
The disparity between Africa and the rest of the “Third World” has become so large that in economic analyses that use regressions, you often see an “Africa” variable.
July 16th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Elizabeth,
Here is a link which may be helpful.
http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/Chart/6809.html
July 16th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
I believe in Matlab (kind of like Dorothy). I can’t recommend it more highly for making graphs like you’re describing (and, I could tell you how to do what you want in Matlab).
Sincerely, I believe the world would be a better place if all analysis and number crunching was done with matlab rather than with excell (Have you ever heard Edward Tufte blaming the Columbia disaster?)
bj
July 17th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
That is an amazing data display-thanks for the links.