This looks like it could be a very useful research tool:
I have been having fun playing around with NationMaster, a cool site developed by Luke Metcalfe, an Australian and fellow stat-geek who was frustrated at his inability to mine the data within the CIA World Factbook. NationMaster now includes data from the World Bank, various United Nations entities, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), World Trade Organization, and so on.
Here's how it works. Head over to NationMaster.com, and select a category from the pull-down menu—anything from Crime to Industry to Sports. Once you have chosen a category, a subject-specific subcategory menu appears, from which you pick a specific topic. For example, subcategories for Health include percentage of infants immunized against measles, number of acute care beds, and obesity in men.
Yes, you could glean these numbers by going through tabular material from various government agencies and NGOs. But that's time-consuming and inefficient. NationMaster goes far beyond providing a simple table. You can view the compiled statistics in bar graphs, pie charts, and maps. There are often even cross-tabs showing correlations between two sets of statistics, such as the inverse relationship between the number of McDonalds restaurants per capita and the number of couples with children.
Looks pretty slick! I haven't had a chance to play around with it much, but it looks like a great repository for working with preliminary data for research ideas. They've also got a companion site for the states:
NationMaster also recently rolled out StateMaster.com, a sister site that offers similar data mining on US state statistics, using sources such as the US Census Bureau, FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a variety of non-profit organizations such as the March of Dimes.
As researchers and information professionals are called upon to provide not just information but intelligence, NationMaster.com is a great resource for gaining new insights from the available information.
As soon as I get through my finals, I'll have to give these sites a spin and see what I can find out!
Related Posts:
- Swivel: The YouTube of Data?
- Religionomics! (With this link to ARDA)
- Maps of Religions in the US
(Hattip Data Mining)
1 comment:
Oh and most definately the radioactive hemispherum must be blamed for the congredential loss of ecomomic and naturic welfare of the biospere. And then the hemiloctosphere and hexiphotosphere cant be blamed for the catostrophic meltdown of both octospheres! The hemisphere cant take such a thing! This is such a big scientific endeavor that my intellect could not fully understand the concept of such a situation! Nice work though, although some is surely incorrect! Although I mean this in a intellectually harmless way. But really, think about it- two octohemispheres and the ecosphere! All together a meltdown of biocongruent sides is just impossible by the way of chemical physics!
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