BuzzData

Following 7

globeandmail (The Globe and Mail)

Canada's national newspaper
jsteeleeditor (Julie Steele)

Editor at O'Reilly Media; contributing Editor of "Beautiful Visualization" (2010). Interests include: Python, Clojure, SQL, databases, machine learning, data viz, open gov, yoga, and eating gluten-free.
momoko (Momoko Price)

BuzzData Staff. The woman behind the blog & tweets :)
john (John McDowall)

BuzzData Development Manager & Data Storage Guy
joncopestake (Jon Copestake)

Editor of Economist Intelligence Unit's Worldwide Cost of Living and Liveability Surveys. Also Chief Consumer Goods and Retail Analyst
paulbradshaw (Paul Bradshaw)

Blogger and data journalist
sarah (Sarah Facini)

I'm a lucky person who spends my days working at BuzzData.

Followers 5

momoko (Momoko Price)

BuzzData Staff. The woman behind the blog & tweets :)
john (John McDowall)

BuzzData Development Manager & Data Storage Guy
wawwas (MSW)
haz (Christian Muise)

PhD Computer Science student at the University of Toronto.
sarah (Sarah Facini)

I'm a lucky person who spends my days working at BuzzData.

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arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Filippo Lovato

Congratulations, a very good idea indeed, well done!

arcald

started following sarah

arcald

added Greek Political Parties And Their Relationships to the Europe Topic

arcald

published the Greek Political Parties And Their Relationships Dataroom

arcald

commented on Best City Contest-Matthew Watters

Hello Matthew, interesting approach and Numbeo seems to be a great resource!
All the best

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Jeremy Albisser

Hello Jeremy, i really liked the way you have put the indicators in context through a relevant simple question. All the best

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Andrew Dyck

Clean and quick application. As a user, I would not mind a few more questions to get some more accurate results though. It would definitely still not be a "waste of time" even if it went up to 7-10 questions.

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Martin Magdinier

Nice one :-) The objective metrics are great but the popular consensus is certainly not to be missed, at least for each potential to reveal the details of what is really valued by people.

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Eivind Loevig

Hi, i liked the way the weather parameter was incorporated in your index as well. Just as a note: Weather does have a significant impact on humans but "the more sunshine, the better" is not a universal rule :-). What the human body seems to like is "warmth and bright light but also, stability". Here is a link (http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/1/79.extract)....Jamaica had, for a long time, low incidence of heart disease which, besides the lifestyle, was also attributed to the fact that the temperature variability was rather low (It stays somewhere around 25 C throughout the year)...The temperature variability can be obtained from Wolfram Alpha for a rather long time, for example (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jamaica+temperature+since+1980). All the best.

eivindw

Hi arcald, and sorry for the slow response.

You make a very good point, sunnier isn't always better, just most of the time. ;)

It seemed to me to be a reasonable enough simplification - especially when you consider that excessive temperatures (high or low) and drought will give a reduction in the two other parameters making up my weather model.

Too much sun can lead to health problems (even when you discount the heat) such as skin cancer. Too little sun can lead to health problems as well, usually vitamin D deficiency or winter depression. I guess people can complain about weather, no matter what it is, if they really want to... :D

⚐ x

arcald

started following the Best City Contest - Christian Muise Dataroom

arcald

started following the Best City Contest - Filippo Lovato Dataroom

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Filippo Lovato

Great idea...In fact, maybe this explicitly spatial dimension is something that is missing from the EIU indices. After all, cities are all about making livable spaces.

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Christian Muise

Hi, i am looking forward to the "behind the scenes" functionality :-). Great job...I was thinking more about an objective metric but the "wisdom of the crowds" is certainly not something to be ignored.

haz

Thanks ;). Although it would be a quick fix to hook up the beakers (the text is already written for every page), I think that is more of a new feature than a simple bug fix: I'm only putting in critical fixes with a full change-log so visitors can experience what was actually submitted (at least until the contest is over).

I'd be more than happy to answer any questions about what's going on though if you'd like. It'd be interesting to scale the distance computation you used based on the expected indicator weights from thecity4.me. I bet there'd be some shake-up in the absolute distances, and you could add the filter to each of your questions: i.e., What are the two most different cities...according to the preferences of Canadians? ...according to my preferences? etc.

Great visualizations btw. Love the idea of Athens at the centre ;).

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arcald

Yes, correlating the public opinion with objective metrics (as you suggest in the second paragraph) would be interesting.

Thanks for your comments, the good thing about this kind of presentation is that every city gets a chance at the centre of the stage :-D

⚐ x

arcald

started following paulbradshaw

arcald

started following joncopestake

arcald

commented on Best City Contest - Arcturus Aldebaran

Just a short addition to the previous visualisations that shows the "shortest" path through the cities, described by the EIU liveability data. The graph is the multidimensional scaling output (with large errors, i am afraid :-/ ). Distance is taken as the "Euclidean Distance" as defined by the index vectors.
Basically, the graph shows what would be the smallest steps to be taken by Karachi so that it "progresses" as a city towards the markers of Vancouver.