Gate 2 Plate winner credits data research for win

ABC Online Husband and wife farmers from the Great Southern region in Western Australia has credited weeks of data research as the primary reason for a win in Western Australia's only beef feedlot challenge.

Compelling Stories for Opening up Data

In a series of value-stories, the Open Data Handbook (http://opendatahandbook.org) provides compelling stories around the world why making data more open can generate huge benefits both socially and economically.  Here's some samples.

http://opendatahandbook.org/value-stories/en/

Open data reduces mortality rate in UK hospitals
Written by Katelyn Rogers
http://opendatahandbook.org/value-stories/en/uk-mortality/

Hong Kong/China - open sourcing genomes / crowdsourcing killer outbreaks
Written by S.C. Edmunds
http://opendatahandbook.org/value-stories/en/open-sourcing-genomes/

Open data businesses - an oxymoron or a new model?
Written by Mor Rubinstein & Christian Villum
http://opendatahandbook.org/value-stories/en/business-and-open-data/

Exposing $62m in potential pharmaceutical savings in Southern Africa
Written by The Open Data Institute
http://opendatahandbook.org/value-stories/en/pharmaceutical-savings-in-southern-africa/

Birth and Death Records Help Create Macroscopic View of Cultural History

Art historian Maximilian Schich and his co-authors created a macroscopic view of cultural history by analysing birth and death records of 150,000 notable individuals over a period of 2000 years.   They sourced their data from Freebase.com, the General Artist Lexicon, and the Getty Union List of Artist Names.  The findings were published in "A network framework of cultural history", Science 1 August 2014: Vol. 345 no. 6196 pp. 558-562 DOI: 10.1126/science.1240064.  A video created in conjunction with the paper and the same underlying data has received more than a million view on YouTube.  Free access to the paper and the video is available through:

http://www.cultsci.net/

This is yet another example of how access to data can advance the state of research, innovation, and multi-disciplinary collaboration.
 
Editor's Summary:

Sociologists and anthropologists study the growth and evolution of human culture, but it is hard to measure cultural interactions on a historical time scale. Schich et al. developed a tool for extracting information about cultural history from simple but large sets of birth and death records. A network of cultural centers connected via the birth and death of more than 150,000 notable individuals revealed human mobility patterns and cultural attraction dynamics. Patterns of city growth over a period of 2000 years differed between countries, but the distribution of birth-to-death distances remained unchanged over more than eight centuries.

 

Data Stories - bringing data to life

For those who haven’t seen this yet, the DCC has been collaborating with the RDA Engagement Interest group to create the Your Data Stories blog to share examples of good and 'not-so-good' practice in research and scholarly data management, and demonstrate the benefits of data sharing and reuse. 

There are some wonderful stories there already - check them out at

http://datastories.jiscinvolve.org/wp/?utm_source=Pipeline+Newsletter&utm_campaign=cb527f71b2-Pipeline_April_201504&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a11772394f-cb527f71b2-323365553

Data stories from the DataONE project

The NSF-funded DataONE project has been collecting and releasing data stories. Headline stories include:

• Human error: the ultimate test
• The patience of the data hunter
• Data lockdown
• The long and winding road to public data
• and plenty more

Read them all at: https://notebooks.dataone.org/data-stories/