I recently spend about 8 weeks as a public transport commuter rather than cycle commuter and had the opportunity to listen to a lot of podcasts (some of which I've already posted about ). One that I really enjoyed was Story Telling With Data which is where I heard about the monthly challenge that Cole runs. The December challenge was to make a holiday themed visualisation so I decided to investigate how travel patterns change in the holiday period, which for Australia is about a quarter to half of December and all of January. The data set I found was for international departures from Australia however the destinations appear to be only to the first stop of the flight. Unfortunately the data did not include spatial information for the airports or the standard airport codes so I had to do some wrangling to make everything work. This and the fact it took me a while to draw out the interesting (and communicable) insights meant that I well and truly missed the challenge deadlin...

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...

I've been using R for a few years now and have found it fantastic for all the data manipulation and visualisation I was doing, plus you can even use it to build web apps! So to help people get going with R I've put together a pre-tutorial to show off a little of what it can do and help you work out if it is for you. Why use R? Overview and case studies One thing I missed in the video was to explain what R actually is, so here's my super brief definition... R is an open source data analysis scripting (or programming) language which was originally developed for statistical analysis but is now used more broadly in many scientific and business fields. It is my second ever video tutorial so please be kind but I do welcome suggestions for improving them or requests for topics/questions you are interested in. Also, what do you think of the new logo?

I'm big believer in beauty in simplicity... most of the time.  But regardless this is a great presentation that walks through some table formatting options that produce a much more readable table.  Interestingly the starting point is quite similar to the Microsoft defaults... Clear Off the Table

For years now I've been recommending QGIS to friend and colleagues with the caveat that there is bit of a learning curve, but that it's really great!  So to help these people along I've created a video tutorial that will get you up and running with QGIS. Intro to QGIS: Installing and Importing - Quickstart guide It is my first ever video tutorial so please be kind but I do welcome suggestions for improving them or requests for topics/questions you are interested in.  In future I probably won't record on quite so little sleep with a sleeping baby in the next room...

While delving into some data science communities I had hear of Kaggle many times over and had even created an account, but it wasn't until I got an email about a dataset of Kiva loans that I actually got interested. First of all, what is Kaggle? Kaggle is a platform for predictive modelling and analytics competitions in which statisticians and data miners compete to produce the best models for predicting and describing the datasets uploaded by companies and users. - Wikipedia Essentially it is a data science playground where you can access data, do analysis, look at other peoples analysis and enter competitions. If you submit an analysis then all your code is available for others to see which means you can 'be inspired' techniques you see others using and also makes it easier assist others when they need help. So what about Kiva? Kiva Microfunds is a 501 non-profit organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs ...