New government website has a million and one tabloid scare stories.
EXCLUSIVE! Government figures released today proved a direct link between dentists and Benzine emissions, a known carcinogen, in the Sheffield area. When plotted on a map, the figures clearly show the correlation between the density of dentist surgeries (stars) and the quantity of Benzene pollution (darker purple means more pollution).
Of course that is pure Bad Science – not that it stops the tabloids from using the figures in that way.
The government launched a new website today to encourage people to mash-up it’s data. As you would expect, the various branches of government hold a vast mount of statistics and data, most of it paid for by the taxpayer, but not available to the public. This site aims to encourage people to come up with innovative mashups, websites and services using it. Putting it’s money where it’s mouth is, it also claims to have made gigabytes of government data, from census figures to NHS data, available to work and play with.
One service which I’ve immediately had fun playing with is the Office of National Statistics’ Neighbourhood Statistics
site. It enables you to browse a vast amount of data, from the number
of people working in your neighbourhood, to the air quality. You can
also compare one against the other on Flash maps, and get
hold of the data through the APIs.
And the wrong statistical conclusions you can come up with this
service are amazing – surely years worth of stories for the Daily Mail
/ Daily Express / etc. For example, it only took me five minutes of hard journalistic research to discover the shocking exclusive above.
Making public data available is a massive step in the right direction, although they could still learn a thing or two about making APIs friendly and easy to access – whereas services like Digg, Amazon and Last.fm make their APIs dead easy to register for andget started, many of these new government sources force to you to register, and undergo a manual approval process at their end before you can start using it. Their documentation also seems to be fairly verbose and heavy on the public-sector speak.
So now to pitch our idea – the tabloid scare story generator…
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