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Google Snaps Up Stats Tool from Swedish Charity
paulraps writes "A stats program that began as a teaching aid for a university lecture has just been bought by Google for an undisclosed sum. The statistics tool, Trendalyzer, was developed by a professor and his son at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute. Unfortunately for the developers, the project has been run under the auspices of a charity, Gapminder, and financed over the last seven years by public money. Maybe that seemed smart at the time, but the professor, admitting that he won't see a dime of Google's cash, now seems regretful. As for what Google has purchased: 'Public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics. Until now, nobody has thought of collecting all the information in the same place. That should be possible with Trendalyzer, which will be able to present that quantity of data in a clear way as well as giving the user the ability to compare many different kinds of information.'"
Google, I dig you for now, but I'm not really sure that I care for the idea of having google own nearly all of the search data for every search done by every individual around the planet in the history of google and beyond combined with all of the world-wide traffic analysis data.
And as someone who would be targeted for this service -- why would I bother? There are plenty of free open source utilities out there that provide every ounce of data you could ever want and they're incredibly easy to configure and deploy.
No, the benefit here seems to be less for the end-users deploying the service and more for whoever google then turns around and sells the massive amounts of correlated information to. For instance, let's see every bit of data about a specific user so we can see everything from each search he does to his entire browsing trail. Bet we could sell that for a lot of money!
Hopefully you will still have a simple way as a user to prevent google from collecting this information just like you can do with their stupid Urchin service (by blocking it). And, sadly, people will still continue to use this new service because they'll sell out their mother's medical history and offer up a sample of their own blood and cholesterol ratings if it means getting something "for free".
Neither article nor summary explain what Trendalyzer actually does. The animated mapping of stats at http://tools.google.com/gapminder is a little more illustrative.
From the Gapminder site:
To me, this seems to imply that the professor and his son were the original developers, not the maintainers. Or perhaps just his son is going to Google?
I personally block all advertisements, period. I don't care about people justifying the need for ads and how I'm "stealing" if I don't watch the ads on a site. I remember a time when people ran services like BBSes (which could require quite a large personal investment at times) because they enjoyed it. Not because they could make a bunch of money, be the next famous internet-whore. They understood a project was probably going to cost them money rather than make them money and they didn't care.
Now it seems that if you don't offer advertising and you don't make money off it, there is somehow no reason to be bothered with it. I offer a service and have for almost a decade now and I've spent about $30k on it. No ads. No fees. No nothing. It's a service. I love providing it. It's enjoyable. Could I make money on it? Sure. Have companies offered me a lot of money to buy it from me? Yeah. Will I sell it? Fuck no. What's the point of the web if it's just reduced to one giant market?
...why isn't it already in the public domain?
Lot's of people have great ideas that never reach fruition for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And sometimes, those ideas can take off and be promoted for reasons that have nothing to do with them. Often these things offend our sense of fairness.
Yet life is not fair and often people have regrets and indulge in "what if" fantasies.
For something like this, even if the fellow gets no money, he can get publicity and recognition and might be able to leverage that into something to get him more money if that's what he wants.
The past is past and the price for obtaining "justice" and "fairness" can be quite high and more than one should have to pay; you can lose your future doing it.
Learn from the past and develop a plan to move forward and leverage on the lessons learned; the best revenge is always living well.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Shortly thereafter, a site called Nation Master cropped up, with a bit flashier and simpler user interface, but focused on CIA World Fact Book data, rather than the States of the US. (The same folks later did State Master using similar UI technology.)
Finally, Google tested Gapminder with an even spiffier and simpler UI -- again focusing on by Nation correlations.
Aside from the usual complaints about "The Ecological Fallacy" (a fallacy that cuts both ways BTW) there are two big pitfalls for this stuff:
What I did about missing data was simply eliminate any data points where data was missing from one or both of the variables being correlated. This reduces the sample size, hence statistical significance, but it bypasses arguments over what sort of missing data should be used. The Netflix Prize is coming up with really good algorithms to compute missing data efficiently and accurately so maybe there is hope for something more effective here.
Statistical significance is more difficult to deal with. Usually one must look at tables for statistical significance of correlations under the assumption that the variables each follow a normal distribution. Unfortunately, many variables follow polynomial (like squared) or exponential distributions, so you have to do things like take the sqrt or log of one or both of the variables to try to normalize them. However, when you are looking for correlations, sometimes it its the relationship that is polynomial or exponential -- in which case you can apply sqrt or log to get the maximum correlation coefficient at the sacrifice of normality of one or both of the variables. Unfortunately, there is no simple arithmetic formula for calculating the significance level of a correlation given a non-normal distribution -- you can't just plug in the skewness, kurtosis, etc. as well as sample size and correlation coefficient, and get out a valid statistical significance. Therefore it is hard to make good statements about many very important correlations without watering them down to meaninglessness.
Also, a complaint about the "simple" user interfaces:
Some of the worst reporting from news media comes when they refuse to report statistics in terms remotely related to anything meaningful -- for example you will frequently hear statements to the effect that "California has the most orange trees in the nation." or some such. Such statistics are nonsense for the purposes of correlation studies since the size of the ecology (California state) is all you are really measuring with such statements. You have to divide by the population or divide by the total GDP or something to rationalize the ecology against other ecologies.
In Laboratory of the States, I did this with all my variables but I also left the raw variables around and allowed people to do arithmetic on them -- like dividing them -- to get their own rational comparisons if for some reason my choices were not adequate. This problem isn't as bad with Gapminder as it is with Nation Master and State Master -- but Gapm
Seastead this.
I don't know what counts as evil in your book, but I hate the way they encourage and perpetuate domain squatting.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Ah...so you remember when the Internet was an educational and military tool, back before it took off?
Back before Google, or even Yahoo. Back when a T1 cost $1500/mo or more, making entry in to the ISP business difficult. Back before multimedia content (shareware games) pushed your average home user's bandwidth above 2400 baud.
Yeah, commercialization of the Internet really destroyed its value.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I think one has to see Rosling work with Trendalyzer to appreciate what that piece of software can do. He got standing ovations for his presentation at the TED conference in 2006. Very cool.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Actually, this is the antithesis of chartjunk.
It's also not as new as people are making it out to be, besides being a variant of a scatter plot,
they've been around for awhile. To murder a quote from Hamlet:
There are more things in infographic design, OldBaldGuy, Than are dreamt of by Microsoft Excel.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Rosling gave a 20min presentation of Trendalyzer at the TED 2006 conference, using it to debunk some of the prejudices we have about the world. Turns out chimpanzees beat swedish professors when making claims about the world. Worth watching, as are many of the presentations at TEDtalks.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Is the bad guy the one that bought the software? Or the one that sold it? It's not like anyone was forced to do anything against their will.
And how did this software get under the control of the non-profit? Is the prof getting a salary from them?
That the summary says Google "snapped up" the software seems to suggest that Google snatched it out of their hands or something. I've got a feeling that money changed hands somewhere along the line. Somebody got paid, and I'm betting it was a bundle. Anybody who's smart enough to write an important bit of software ought be able to read a contract before he signs it. And if he thought that just because an organization is non-profit it means that it's not looking to get a pile of cash then maybe he's been vacationing on Pluto for the past few decades or doesn't read the business section of the newspaper. If he didn't write the software to make money, then he shouldn't cry because he didn't make money. If he wanted to make money from his software, then he should have asked a few questions before releasing the project.
I'm among the most anti-big corporation commentors around here, but I'm more intrigued by what's not in this article as by what's there. I'm not ready to hang an evil jacket on Google just for buying something that was for sale.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I always thought statistics was boring but the video by the prof http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2670820702 819322251 really intrigued me, statistics makes so much sense when presented properly... the numbers not only make sense but also explains their relation with other statistics giving a much broader view.. I'm sure a tool like this would be a boon to decision makers...
http://osflash.org/pipermail/osflash_osflash.org/
Gapminder appears to be made from mostly open source code: "mtasc, hamtasc, swfmill, eclipse, swftools, Flash Javascript Integration kit (right now using SWFObject) are some of the tools we've used." The design solutions are unique but the code that was developed seems trivial. Why not open source it? Perhaps the university calculated that selling to google for a small(?) sum was worth more in publicity than open sourcing the project. too bad.
A while ago, these guys came to google to give a techtalk. Here it is: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7996617766 640098677