olihb's comments

Very cool, I did the same thing a while back for the Canadian Parliament. Unfortunately, the party discipline in Canadian politics makes it less interesting.

It has done in flash, when flash was cool... http://olihb.com/2011/02/27/legislative-explorer/

I'm just saying that we must be careful citing CSDM numbers because they represent a special situation. The CSDM have a lot of first generation immigrants, poor students, students with learning disabilities, etc. The middle class students are in good schools in the suburbs or in private schools.

The CSDM in Montreal has such a bad reputation that if you're not accepted in a specialized program (let say, international baccalaureate), you go to a private school if you can afford it (4k$/year). And don't let me start about union rules for new teachers...

On the other hand, if you're a special ed teacher, CSDM is hiring like crazy. Not so much for math, social science, french, English teachers though.

As anything else, the situation is more nuanced. Quebec schools as a whole are pretty good: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/editorials/quebe...

The problem is that good students are mostly in private schools and specialized programs (international programs) so "regular classes" in public schools contain a lot of low performing students and students with disabilities.

My gf is a public high school teacher in Montreal and they do miracles everyday with the low amount of resources that they have to work with. She has a M.Sc. in her specialization (history), but do mostly special education tasks since the student level are so low.

It's still a project from minority government and all institutions/cities can withdraw from it. Montreal(1.65M pop) said that it will not apply the charter in their city.

It still has a long way to go, but it's a good way to change the political agenda and pit rural areas and cities against each other.

The worst thing about this charter is not that it makes a clear separation between church and state (like in France), but rather that some religions are "more equal" than others (for example, the crucifix will remain in the legislative chamber).

So yeah, it's more of a "let's get everybody in the province riled up and angry at each other instead of creating jobs and fixing real problems." And since the separatist option is stuck at 30%, that's pretty much the best the Parti Québecois can do to please their troops.

Right, but there's a subset of Open Access articles from Pubmed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/tools/openftlist/

Not illegal at all. We have plenty of towns with English names.

Author here. What I find really interesting about this map is that the articles seem connected at a local level instead of internationally.

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because usually article will say: "this city is near this other city".

Very nice and more interesting than the bar charts/graph that other twitter visualization tools give us. It would be really cool (and informative) if you could add a small word cloud when the cursor hovers over a city.

I did a similar non-interactive dataviz a while ago during the big student protests in Quebec this spring. I clustered (using LDA) the tweets talking about the protests and I mapped and identified them.

http://olihb.com/?p=199 (in French, though)

No.

Women (and men) are attracted to assertive behavior, not aggressive behavior. Huge difference.

It's not the same data, but I did a PCA with the voting record of Canadian MPs. It's a bit old, so it's in flash instead of html5. You can access it here: http://www.votum.ca

In the video, they say that the water is filtered and chlorinated before going into the cooling system.

This doesn't work on my cellphone's voicemail. I guess the new systems closed that hole.

Nice. It would be very interesting to correlate the migration with unemployment. The outliers (eg: bad economy but migration influx) would be even more interesting.

By the way, I did something similar for scientific collaboration between Metropolitan Statistical Areas: http://olihb.com/?p=140

Exactly. These phenomena are notoriously non-linear.

IMHO, the best way to calculate a good index is to model (usually log-transformed) the relationship between the venture capital dollars and the population (or overall investment, number of degree awarded by year, money invested in R&D, etc.), then take the ratio between the expected value and observed value. The resulting index is less sensible to scale issues.

I really don't like Elsevier, but the alternatives do not really exist.

Most open Access aggregators are of dubious quality and don't provide an interface for peer-reviewing. Even worst, the harvesting standard (OAI) is implemented in so many different ways and no two sites/platform implement it in a consistent way. Scopus also extract references, citations, addresses, etc. which are necessary to compute influence and impact.

Microsoft Academic and Google Scholar are starting to look as an alternative, but I'm wouldn't be surprised if they licensed their data from Elsevier&Thomson.

Until these services are duplicated in the Open Access community, Elsevier will still be needed.

I really don't like Elsevier, but the alternatives don't exist

Most open Access databases are of dubious quality and don't provide an interface for peer-reviewing. Even worst, the harvesting standard (OAI) is implemented in many different ways depending on the site. Scopus also extract references, citations, addresses, etc. which are necessary to compute influence and impact.

Microsoft Academic and Google Scholar are starting to look as an alternative, but I'm wouldn't be surprised if they licensed their data from Elsevier&Thomson.

Until these services are duplicated in the Open Access community, Elsevier will still be needed.

I'm sure that most big production/distribution houses are not panicking because it's still a new way to distribute content and it's a niche product, but I'm wondering what they are thinking of this right now. Do they view this as an emerging trend or just as a fad?

I was a market research for a couple of years, and 1,25$ per completed survey is cheap if you don't manage your own panel database.

We paid around 3.50$ per respondent (french speaking adults in Quebec) and it was significantly more for specific attributes. We used GMI for our samples. Phones survey were more expensive, something like 0.25$/question/respondent.

It seems I cannot reply to TeMPOraL, but here are some citations:

Iyengar, S. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.

Iyengar, S. et Kinder, D. R. 1987. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.

The New Videomalaise : Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust DC Mutz - American Political Science Review, 2005 - Cambridge Univ Press http://www.jstor.org/pss/30038915

My M.Sc. in PolSci was useful after all... A third of my master thesis is on that very subject, but it's in french...

Nice, but most visualizations don't take in account the scaling effects present in the data. Most social science systems are wildly non-linear.

IMHO, the best way is to try to model the data, then calculate the ratio between the predicted and the observed (real) data point. From there, you would have an index that account for the scaling in the system. The problem is that the model needs a good number of points and the data should not be too heteroscedastic. It's the hot new thing in scientometrics...