#gdelt

[sukosuko]

google can predict the future

psychohistory go brrrrrrrvideo essay on the main ideas of the foundation series and the impact of the works of isaac asimov.other videos by the mustached man...

[ph4z0n]

Radio Ngrams Dataset Allows New Research into Public Health Messaging - Internet Archive Blogs

Guest post by Dr. Kalev Leetaru Radio remains one of the most-consumed forms of traditional media today, with 89% of Americans listening to

[chughp]

Are we getting better at looking forward, but compromising our ability to look backwards?

Last year the GDELT project published a paper on how crunching through the big data of history can help us spot patterns and work out where the world is heading next. The GDELT database monitors news (broadcast, print, web) from across the world in over 100 languages and uses complex computer algorithms to codify what’s happening throughout the globe. Certainly our ability to project the future will improve, as we apply more sophisticated ArtificialIntelligence to draw such predictions about the future

Earlier this week however, Vint Cerf, one of pioneers of Internet, in his recent conversation at the American Association of Advancement of Science expressed a different concern.  He said that the humanity could be headed towards a digital black hole as the digital objects are becoming unreadable as the technology evolves.  He said that we be putting misplaced confidence in the longevity of digital information.  The information GDELT and similar such efforts are trying to preserve is tip of the iceberg. The volume of data that is getting generated continues to grow exponentially, much of which (currently) of no obvious value. Much of this data is being stored with little thought on how it will be retrieved by historians of the future generations. We are at the risk of losing a lot of this information, compromising the ability of future historians to look backwards.

A few years back, I was chatting with a friend and client in the Aerospace industry responsible for archiving engineering data for the airplanes they designed. I was intrigued to learn that the company kept all their designs on printed paper, and not in digital format. My friend told me that that the ever-evolving digital world meant there was no safe way to store this information in digitized manner.

Till the time we are able to create what Dr Cerf calls a ”digital vellum”, it may be a smart idea for my friend to maintain the printed documents for their airplane design, and for you and I to print the digital photographs taken from our latest digital cameras

[sebrand]

Bordering Me (HackMIT 24 hour project)

Winner of the Google GDelt Data Challenge and awarded the Google Service Prize. The project will be posted on Google's official blog in the coming weeks.

Winner of the nameCheap best domain name. 

Winner of Nod Ring

Summary:

Bordering.me is a 3D data visualization of worldwide marterial conflict and material cooperation between cities and how connected those relationships are to you. Material conflict includes things like the US refusing the continue to import natural gas from Canada through the Keystone XL pipeline while material cooperation might be apple opening up a new warehouse with Foxconn in China. The visualization is set up with a holographic projection while the user interacts with the globe using a gesture sensing ring. From the start the user inputs their location to show all the cities with which their area has had direct material cooperation with in the past month. With a swipe up they can then see cities with 1 degree of separation. With another swipe they see that after 2 degrees of separation, the material negotiations relevant to their location are connected to part of the entire planet. 

Story:

Last weekend I was flown out to Boston to participate in HackMIT. I didn't have a team when I got there so on the morning of, I hunted down a couple of genius freshmen, Ian Macalinao and Akhilesh Yarabarla, saying they were looking into doing 3D data visualization. At the last second we picked up a senior math major named Feyman Liang.

We rigged up this holographic display with a spare monitor, some sheets of plastic, and a hand-full of Bloomberg stickers. 

at first we thought we would mess around with some fit bit health data.

However, after listening to a talk by the Senior Engineering Lead from Google Ideas we decided we wanted to use data that could actually change people's world view. 

We ended up using Google bigQuery on the GDelt database to pull a list of all events of material cooperation and material conflict between cities in the past month. Material cooperation might be Apple(Cupertino) opening a new factory in Beijing. Material conflict might be DC blocking flights from Nigeria due to the threat of Ebola. 

Each of these events what associated with a location and an edge width(<1 being a conflict | >1 being a cooperation). We mapped this data onto a 3D globe in order by degrees of separation from the user interacting with the map. 

To further experiment with the idea of immersive 3d experience with data we mapped the interactions to nod ring gestures. Here is a badly filmed demo:

Here is the demo website. Press 'f' to flip it as you probably aren't using an inverted display. All navigation is done with the arrow keys. Once you're on the map page you can drag with the cursor to turn the globe. Press to left and right arrow keys to show conflict edges one additional degree of separation at a time. Use up and down to show cooperation edges. 

[andro4all]

[roomthily]

a rant about fivethirtyeight, gdelt and nigeria. it's a good one.

[dartthrowingchimp]

Screenshot from a CartoDB visualization of atrocities event data culled from GDELT using a "human in the loop" process described in this blog post of mine.

[computationalsociology]

Informazione e conflitti

Secondo un gruppo di ricercatori statunitensi, però, questo genere di studi non tiene conto di uno dei parametri più significativi disponibili: la copertura mediatica dei conflitti. La maggior parte dei dati non include la quantità e la qualità delle notizie apparse sui mezzi d’informazione sui singoli eventi. In questo modo “le proteste del 2011 in piazza Tahrir in Egitto o quelle a Kiev nel 2013 contano come un singolo evento, e non c’è modo di distinguerle dalle decine di migliaia di altre proteste avvenute contemporaneamente nel mondo”, spiega Kalev Leetaru dell’università di Georgetown su Foreign Policy.