xkcd: Survivorship Bias Are you biased ? Would you know if you were? Statistics views biases as something to be avoided or corrected, and for good reason, because statistics typically seeks to use a sample to represent an entire 'population'. But I recently heard a new take on it which advocated that you should use your bias in doing data analysis, data visualisations and decision making. In order to use your biases the first thing to know is that everyone is biased due to their differing circumstances, and of course being human. The idea is that a person will have a unique point of view which is valuable, but that it won't be possible to fully understand others point of view or how that point of view will affect others. Therefore the key is collaborating with others that have different biases, with some level of understand of your biases and those of your collaborators. In many ways this is no different to the statistical approach but rather than trying to find...

My wife and I are currently house hunting and this will be the first house I've ever bought so I'm a little nervous about not messing it up (perfectionist and all that). So when we find a property we're interested in I dig into the details by checking for easements, looking at the drainage and checking planning overlays since I know a little about these things from my time in a Local Government engineering department many moons ago. Anyway it turns out that a lot of these things are available as open data, for the whole of Victoria! So to make my life easier I put together a little web app that also works on mobile devices for when you are actually at an inspection. Victorian Property Info Having recently built the Cycle Melbourne map , this one was super quick to put together. I used the same layout, almost the same background maps and just added 4 WMS map layers from land.vic.gov.au . The Leaflet Extras package also allowed me to add a search function and a...