Tasty Data Goodies

Obama v. McCain: war of the words

Following the first Presidential debate that took place Friday evening, Obama and McCain both launched ads targeting their opposing candidate's choice of words.

Early Saturday morning, Obama's campaign released an ad criticizing McCain for failing to say "middle class."  Obama managed to mention the "middle class" three times during the debate on foreign policy.

McCain's campaign released an Internet video citing occasions where Obama said that he agreed with McCain's positions.  Obama said the word "agree" five times during the debate; he also said "disagree" three times.  McCain also criticized Obama for not using the word "victory" in reference to Iraq.  McCain said the word "victory" twice and referred to the consequences of "defeat" ten times.

Here's a closer look at what the candidates were talking about using some nifty data visualizations:

Total word count:
Obama: 7,657
McCain: 7,197

Wordle clouds:

Frequently used words:

Data show Merrill Lynch CEO gets paid top dollar

Even in the aftermath of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco at Merrill Lynch, John Thain signed on with a compensation package that totaled almost $83.8 million, making him the highest paid chief executive in America.

Overall, the financial industry annually pays their CEOs small fortunes.  The heads of four financial companies -- John Thain of Merrill Lynch, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs ($54m), Kenneth Chenault of American Express ($50.1m), and John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley ($41.4m) -- were among the five highest paid CEOs in research conducted by NY Times and Equilar.

This graph shows the total compensation awarded to the 10 highest paid CEOs in 2007.  Total compensation includes: base salary, cash bonus, perks/other comp., stock awards, and option awards.

In April 2008, the NY Times reported, "The chiefs of the 10 largest financial service firms were awarded a combined total of $320 million last year, even though the firms reported mortgage-related losses that totaled 55 billion and wiped out more than 200 billion in shareholder value." 

Now, as debate swirls around the $700 billion dollar bailout plan, congress is deciding if companies should be allowed to give "golden parachutes" to executives and establish rules to revoke bonuses awarded on bogus claims. They are also looking into the possibility of putting a cap on executive pay.

The authenticity of data

Is what you're reading online true, false, or somewhere in between?

The Internet has done wonders in terms of making information accessible to people all over the world. Today, bloggers, citizen reporters, and even members of the Swivel community are responsible for adding to the so-called data deluge.  As more and more people pump information online, should we be asking the question: how much of it is actually reliable?

To determine which blogs are more trustworthy, Technorati assigns each one an "authority number".  The more people that link to a blog, the higher the number.  Of 4,969,251 blogs, more than 75,000 have an authority number of 50 or more, which means that at least 50 other people found their blog worth linking to.

At Swivel, data that comes from our Official Sources, such as OECD or WHO, is branded with an official source badge to let our users know that the data is coming from a reliable source.  Swivel members can also link back to a data source for added credibility.  Of the 13,138 data sets on Swivel (as of 9/23/08), 9,049 have been uploaded by the Swivel community and 4,087 have been uploaded by official sources.

While both systems have their benefits and flaws, a number or a badge can only tell you so much. In the end it's really up to you to weed out what's valuable from what's rubbish.

Swivel is growing! (Want to write code with us?)

• 

Working at Swivel

• We’re agile.
• We’re a tight bunch, so we have a lot of fun together.
• We offer medical, dental, vision, 401(k), commuter checks, equity, etc.
• We have a fully stocked kitchen, amazing 12th floor views, solid art on the walls, fun start-up environment.

We're looking for an engineer who

• ... can point to a web app in production and say "I made that."
• ... rocks the basics (linux or osx, ruby+rails or some other scripting web framework, sql, html, css, javascript).
• ... groks the web. Someone who gets HTTP status codes, knows how to avoid XSS, has built and worked with web APIs, speaks fluent REST.
• ... has a few interesting side projects because they're intellectually adventurous. Also, because they’re fun.
• ... thrives on solving supermassive problems with smart people. Our space is still nascent; there is no shortage of interesting work to do.

Full time in downtown SF, CA. No contractors, no telecommuters. Send a resume and tell us about an exciting project you’ve worked on. Don’t be afraid to send us code. Tell your friends! jobs@swivel.com

Tell a (Political) Story with Data

One of our advisors, Charley Kyd, recently suggested we check out a book about communicating with pictures called Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam.

Today, on Dan's blog, there is a story that is at the heart of the US presidential campaign.

Regardless of one's politics, it's an interesting use of pictures and data to create a compelling narrative.

Swivel Comments

A few active Swivelers have recently requested that we make it easier to track what people are saying about the data at Swivel. So, we created a new feature on the home page that shows the last few comments.

Or you can click on the comments link to check out all the commentary. You can also keep track of comments through your blog reader by subscribing to the comments rss feed.

Happy Swiveling.

Watching Election Data

Though we're a bunch of data nerds here at Swivel, we still talk about the same things as everybody else. Recently, the elections have captured our interest.

Perhaps unlike most people, we at Swivel like to watch the drama unfold in the data.

We monitor news and media attention with Google Trends and Nielsen's BlogPulse.

And we track the results of the changes in media attention with Gallup polls and Intrade elections futures.

Hat tip to Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media for the inspiration for this post.