71–80 of 359 posts
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Yeah I got a Cloudflare DDOS check then a 503. Non HTTPS seems to be working, http://usafacts.org/
Cloudflare lately has become an immediate tab-closing prompt the way paywalls usually are
Super slow for what should amount to HTML - why is this website so slow?
Because thousands (millions?) are stomping to it, as it was just announced and went viral?
Edit: tbh it's a shame they chose to do it all in react/js. I think this sort of data would be better served to the world as good old html for the most part - the build tool generated source for some of the pages on usafacts is horrendous.
This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources. Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions. The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn! From the NYT [1]: Want to know how many pol…
I would not be so sure. There's no such thing as a point of view from nowhere.
Bias can influence the collection and computation of data just as easily as it can influence its presentation and framing. The old saying is "never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself."
In some ways, presenting as neutral means that neither group is going to trust you. I'm not sure if it actually accomplishes anything.
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I find PerotCharts more useful (with commentary), than this particular site. Too bad it has not been updated in a while. http://perotcharts.website/ Yes, its that Perot: Ross Perot.
For those prone to confirmation bias, commentary and interpretation of data can be counterproductive. The fact that Ballmer is purposefully not setting an agenda makes this more powerful. Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
Yes, I agree.
> Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
I think people will do this anyway...are we not human?
Dear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 . - Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all…
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> In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year? Or it's from another source that gives different metrics obtained every 10 years (e.g. from census) with some extrapolation? In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run, it's the lack of source and other metadata that its more troubling.
Why would it extrapolate 25% lower values on all other years? If the 10th years are the actual data points, the computed trend line through only census years shouldn't be so radically different from the drawn markers. In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run The differences in those years are _huge_.
Except if the trend line is based on the other data source, and the peaks on the census data.
Dear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 . - Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all…
I'm actually more suspicious of anything claiming to be "non-partisan" than something that wears its foundational beliefs on its sleeves. At least if something says "We are a Libertarian non-profit" or "We are a Socialist non-profit" or something like that, I know better what specific grain of salt to use when reading its materials. Anything that claims to be non-profit is merely hiding the slant that its people have…
Fair point! I should hope raw numbers are truly unbiased, though they could still include more graphs that paint the picture they're wanting to paint. Note that i've not yet seen the site, even with http it's under a nearly dead load haha.
This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources. Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions. The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn! From the NYT [1]: Want to know how many pol…
Given that I'm just now writing a professional development series for using R in the classroom, these data sources would be really useful . Having a broad source of things we could analyze would be rad.
Use some examples from the above for the class presentations, then homework is to replicate with US data.
PS: if you decide to publish your presentations/course materials freely, do post the location to HN
Before anyone goes putting a ton of trust in these charts... Compare the following: http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 vs http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966 In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year? ( imgur link to screenshots in case the links don't work: http://imgur.com/a/tY02j )
Isn't this just likely to be caused by the census data?
The big jumps on census years indicate that the census department does not estimate accurately when working with 9-year-old data.