Lately, I’ve been entranced by Google’s Public Data Explorer in Labs, launched in March.  This builds on the Public Data Search Feature that Google launched last year.

It’s doubly wonderful because it uses the Trendanalyzer software developed by Hans Rosling’s Gapminder foundation and recently sold to Google.  (We’ve covered Rosling elsewhere here.)  The big breakthrough in this software is using very basic animation, to plot data against time.  Graphs have never been so fun to look at.

Check out this video of Ola Rosling (Hans’ son, presumably) pointing out some of the strange patterns that he has found.  My favorite is the strong correlation between states that have high percentage of deaths by motor vehicle accident and death by firearm.  Why?

The launch of this service was little reported but seems to me to be a big step forward in the liberation of public information.  It’s all very well having access to it, but until citizens can analyze it, the true power remains with very few.  It’s practical tools like this that allows individual citizens to know what’s going on and petition for change.

It’s easy to see the application of this to marketing.  Until now, we could build econometric models that would use public data, but it took time and intense specialization.  Now anyone with enough time and interest could look at the correlation of sales to unemployment or illness or whatever.

So says a quantitative model from JP Morgan. Analysts Matthew Burgess and Marco Dion used a model designed to predict stock prices and fed it with past scores and Fifa rankings and came to this unauthordox conclusion.

“Having developed a rather successful Quant Model over the years, we intend to introduce it to our readers and also use its methodology to apply it to a fruitful field for statistics: Football and the World Cup,” they wrote.

Given the reputation of Wall Street “quants” at the moment, doesn’t this seem a little hubristic?

I had my own brush with soccer stardom this week in Sao Paulo, where I spent Monday and Tuesday with Marcello Magalhaes and the wonderful people in the the Ogilvy office there.  This is one of the beacons of the Ogilvy network.  Check out their work here.

During my short visit, there was a running joke that I would be rewarded with a free T-shirt.  And on the last day I was given a Corinthians soccer shirt signed by Ronaldo, in a gesture typical of the Brazilian’s crazy  generosity.

Sadly, Ronaldo will not be playing in the world cup this year.  Instead, Ogilvy has signed him up for a Twitter campaign for Claro, the country’s largest mobile phone network, in a superb digital influence campaign.

Obviously, as a Scot, I have to assume that the JP Morgan prediction is deeply flawed, and thus that their models are worthless.  I have, of course,  shorted their stock.

The last time Scotland qualified for the World Cup, in 1998, they were crushed by the Brazilians in their first match.  I will, however, this year, be giving my full support to their valiant team.

Imagine my delight when I saw that The New York Times magazine ran a cover story by Gary Wolf with the same title and theme as one of my recent posts: “The Data Driven Life“.

It’s a thoroughly researched piece about the trend of self monitoring, which, it turns out, has become a sizable sub-culture.  I have to admit that this came as a joyful epiphany to me.

Wolf’s central insight is that conditions have arisen which will take a behavior (which is a natural inclination for many, but impractical for most) mainstream:

“Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”

Here’s a quick round up of some of the sites covered he covers:

Wolf himself has a blog with Kevin Kelly called The Quantified Self.  This is an extensive resource and has a library of film clips of talks from Quantified Self Meet Ups.

drinkingdiary.com is a very simple piece of software that allows you to keep an accurate tally of alcohol consumption, on the basis that what gets measured, gets better.

Moodscope is an online tracker of your mood or mental health, with the twist that it reports this information to your friends, on the basis that, “there’s solid scientific evidence that the very act of knowing you’re being watched can change the way your mind works for the better”.

Goodreads allows you to keep track of and share the books you’ve read and what you thought of them.

Medhelp is a sophisticated mult-purpose site that includes a tracker for weight and exercise and other health indicators.

There are many others out there.  Clearly, these sites could become as addictive as the behaviors they purport to cure!

As an experiment on the efficacy of these sites, I’ve undertaken to monitor my drinking, weight and exercise habits for the next month and will report back on what effect self-monitoring has on me.

I was talking to Andy McMains of AdWeek today who asked me if “thoughtful blogger” wasn’t an oxymoron.  I hope not.

I found Clive Thompson’s recent Wired post on “Why We Should Learn the Language of Data” thoughtful.

He argues that being “statistically illiterate” is bad for your health, and everyone else’s too.  (Shouldn’t that be  “innumerate”, talking of literacy?)  Understanding the realities of global warming, the benefits of vaccines and the fate of the economy all depend on a basic understanding of statistics.  “Statistics is the new grammar”, he posits.

This seems undeniable to me.  Statistics should be a basic requirement in high school.  I gained my shaky grasp of stats in an ad agency – surely not the best place to do so.

This is really part of a wider issue:  the attack on science.  Recently, in Kentucky, a bill was  was introduced which proposed which would encourage teaching of “the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories,” including “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning” in schools.  Quite remarkable.

Michael Specter, the New Yorker writer, deals with this in his new book “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens our Lives”. He lashes out right and left, railing equally against global warming deniers and organic food fans.  I recently saw him give a superb talk on this, which you can see here.