Introduction, and any Mac OS-X tiger users on the list

[dwighthines]

My name is Dwight Hines, a retired college professor, now a political
activist , in St. Augustine, Florida.

I use Mac OS-X.4.11, and do not have a favorite software visual
program for large or small data sets.

Is anyone currently looking at different sampling methods to make
large data sets small and seeing how accurately different
visualization techniques hold up when the data are skewed or other
wise goofy?

Is anyone looking at visualizing large data sets when they the number
of missing values makes for very sparse matrices? What types of
imputation techniques are folks using?

Is anyone on the list comparing different jurisdictions on different
measures to detect local corruption?

Is anyone on the list looking at environmental measures, specifically
illegal dumping of toxic substances?

Dwight Hines
St. Augustine, Florida

[Seth Russell]

Dwight Hines said ...

 

Is anyone on the list looking at environmental measures, specifically
illegal dumping of toxic substances?

Now that you mention it, our government spends the big bucks making us fill out forms, putting us through loads of red tape, and storing the mounds of the data those activities produce.  Yet that data for the most part does not end up being very useful or even accessible to the public. Recently i tried to find some information about this pollution  at the EPA and from King County.  It seems like some data is there but when you try to get down to specifics it trails off into cryptic data value saying in essence nothing.  Once i went looking for patterns of train derailments and found that for all of the reporting regulations of the FRA we end up getting pretty much zilch.  

Is it too much to ask for some small amount of intelligence in return for all of the money our government spends on data collection and storage?

Sorry for the rant.
Seth Russell
http://fastblogit.com/seth