The Land Matrix database is now the most comprehensive public source for information on international land deals – but it is not perfect. Some countries, for example, may be over-represented in the data simply because they are more transparent and routinely publish contract information. In other cases, the data may be skewed towards investors or countries that have featured in more media reports.

Miso is an open source toolkit designed to expedite the creation of high-quality interactive storytelling and data visualisation content.

"On the one hand, Wojcicki highlighted her desire to empower consumer-patients by circumventing the medical establishment and making data available

The Research Data Curation Bibliography includes selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions. For broader coverage of the digital curation literature, see the author's Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010.

As we move into an era of unprecedented volumes of data and computing power, the benefits aren't for business alone. Data can help citizens access government, hold it accountable and build new services to help themselves.

Simply making data available is not sufficient. The use of data for the public good is being driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates.

This report from O'Reilly Radar highlights the principles of data in the public good, and surveys areas where data is already being used to great effect, covering:

Consumer finance
Transit data
Government transparency
Data journalism
Aid and development
Crisis and emergency response
Healthcare

"This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now."

"Computational data analysis is an essential part of modern statistics. Competent statisticians must not just be able to run existing programs, but to understand the principles on which they work. They must also be able to read, modify and write code, so that they can assemble the computational tools needed to solve their data-analysis problems, rather than distorting problems to fit tools provided by others. This class is an introduction to programming, targeted at statistics majors with minimal programming knowledge, which will give them the skills to grasp how statistical software works, tweak it to suit their needs, recombine existing pieces of code, and when needed create their own programs.

Students will learn the core of ideas of programming — functions, objects, data structures, flow control, input and output, debugging, logical design and abstraction — through writing code to assist in numerical and graphical statistical analyses. Students will in particular learn how to write maintainable code, and to test code for correctness. They will then learn how to set up stochastic simulations, how to parallelize data analyses, how to employ numerical optimization algorithms and diagnose their limitations, and how to work with and filter large data sets. Since code is also an important form of communication among scientists, students will learn how to comment and organize code. "

"We're gathering legislative data directly from the states and making it available in a common format through a RESTful API and regular bulk downloads. "

"Technics Publications publishes the most practical, innovative, and easy-to-read data management and business intelligence books with our objective to improve the effectiveness of information technology in the workplace. "

"This year’s report provides the nation’s first assessment of the distribution of birds on public lands and helps public agencies identify which species have significant potential for conservation in each habitat. The state of our birds is a measurable indicator of how well we are doing as stewards of our environment. The signal is clear. Greater conservation efforts on public lands and waters are needed to realize the vision of a nation sustained economically and spiritually by abundant natural resources and spectacular wildlife."

"A team of DAMA members has developed a new book titled "The DAMA Guide to the Data Management Body of Knowledge" (DAMA-DMBOK Guide), under the guidance of a new DAMA-DMBOK Editorial Board. This publication is available from April 5th, 2009.

The “body of knowledge” about data management is quite large and constantly growing. the DAMA-DMBOK Guide provides a “definitive introduction” to data management. It defines a standard industry view of data management functions, terminology and best practices, without detailing specific methods and techniques. The DAMA-DMBOK is not a complete authority on any specific topic, but will point readers to widely recognized publications, articles and websites for further reading."

"In Tufte’s June 1st post, he sums up the use of slopegraphs well: “Slopegraphs compare changes over time for a list of nouns located on an ordinal or interval scale.”

Basically: Any time you’d use a line chart to show a progression of univariate data among multiple actors over time, you might have a good candidate for a slopegraph."

"Our everyday data processing activities create massive amounts of data. Like physical waste and trash, unwanted and unused data also pollutes the digital environment by degrading the performance and capacity of storage systems and requiring costly disposal. In this paper, we propose using the lessons from real life waste management in handling waste data. We show the impact of waste data on the performance and operational costs of our computing systems. To allow better waste data management, we define a waste hierarchy for digital objects and provide insights into how to identify and categorize waste data. Finally, we introduce novel ways of reusing, reducing, and recycling data and software to minimize the impact of data wastage "

A way to get data out of Facebook and an alternative to Twitter.

"What if privacy is keeping us from reaping the real benefits of the infosphere?"

In the information age, journalism needs to go further. Information bombards us. What is scarce is insight, understanding and knowledge.

The news industry is built on the assumption that if you give a reporter a notebook and a few days to ramp up, he can write authoritatively on any subject. That's not enough anymore. In today's information-rich world, reporters need to bring more to the table. To provide readers with truly insightful experiences, they need to have the kind of expertise that will allow them to see the story behind the story, to see what's really going on.

"d8taplex is a resource for finding and manipulating data from the web."

"CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones).

CKAN makes it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data, especially in ways that are machine automatable."

"Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures."

by Paul Edwards

"Data rescue at home is an internet-based attempt to digitize historical weather data from all over the globe and make the digitised data available to everybody. Two projects are currently online: German radiosonde data form the Second World War and meteorological station data from Tulagi (Solomon Islands) for the first half of the 20th century. "

"What is the "challenge" we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences -- ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records -- what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship. "

"The decision highlights a tension between the need for rigorous peer review of scientific research and the desire to provide as much data as possible to the scientific community.

"More data, in and of itself, is always a good thing -- if there aren't adverse effects," said Maunsell, who is also a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But peer review was becoming less effective because many reviewers failed to evaluate the supplemental materials, which the journal wasn't even required to provide, he explained. "We were taking a hit on peer review for something that wasn't formally our responsibility." "

" We are now interconnected enough for amateur scientists and hobbyists to help professional scientists with sensors scattered over the earth collecting data. "

Wrangler allows interactive transformation of messy, real-world data into the data tables analysis tools expect.

Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository.

"I realized I wasn't scared of stats: just bored and annoyed and wondering, indeed, what they had to do with various things. Keeping track of lots of data makes for pretty graphs and useful trends. Those kinds of stats are cool. But statistical analysis of data doesn't always make sense to the people using it. Not just because it's complicated, but because it's not always informative of what they're looking at. It has to make sense in context. You have to be able to actually answer the question "what's stats go to do with it?", and not just use it rhetorically like I did in most of this post. "

Around the world, key scientific data are at risk of being lost, either because they are held on fragile or obsolete media or because they may be destroyed by researchers who are unaware of their value. Now a team of scientists is planning to scour museums and research institutes to draw up a global inventory of threatened data. Launched on 29 October, shortly after the biennial conference of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the project aims to publish the inventory online in 2012.

So in the interests of stimulating this debate, I'm reproducing here Helbing's list of websites that are potential sources of data for an Earth Simulator. It makes for fascinating, if unnerving, reading:

In other words, Assange (and I presume Wikileaks as a whole) are publishing bulk-leaked documents because:
Authoritarian organizations (including most present-day national governments and large corporations) are naturally unjust, secretive, and conspiratorial.
The networks of information and influence inside such organizations are less stable to leaking than the corresponding networks inside open, just, and non-authoritarian organizations. They will either become hardened and (even more) inefficient, or they will become more open, less authoritarian, and more just. Either result is a win.

Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.

It's because data is powerful but fickle. A lot of theoretically promising approaches don't work because there's so many barriers between spotting a possible relationship and turning it into something useful and actionable.

Wednesday the Federal Reserve released data on more than 21,000 loans and other deals it made through a dozen emergency programs created during the financial crisis. The Fed used trillions of dollars to stabilize the economy when the housing bubble burst and credit markets froze.

We combined the Fed’s three programs that loaned directly to banks and other financial firms with the goal of getting them to start lending again. We hope to post on the Fed’s other programs soon.

We've gone into all the problems involved with preserving and sharing scientific data in some detail, but the challenges don't end there. Typically, data doesn't speak for itself; it has to be analyzed and interpreted. And, these days, that analysis generally involves computer tools. Even basic images of cells can end up being processed to look for things like signal intensity and total area of signal. The results of that analysis may end up plugged into a spreadsheet and subjected to a further analysis. This general approach—a pipeline of software tools—makes documenting and reproducing exactly what happened to generate a final result.