Pirate Party wins 9% of Vote in Germany on Talk like a Pirate Day
”We want to make public all data, all administrative procedures,” said Martin Delius, a 27-year-old IT engineer.
The election win has thrust the party, and its leader, into the limelight. ”From IT-nerd to full-time politician,” said the Financial Times Deutschland online edition in a profile of Andreas Baum, the head of the group.
Its supporters and leaders are young and well educated - most of those who voted for the party were under 30, according to an election analysis by television channel ZDF.
I feel that this kind of sentiment will be coming soon from young, savvy voters here in the US. The advantage of a percentage-based system is that you don’t need much to still get a few seats in parliament so it’s tougher to get on the board in the US system of voting. (not saying I prefer percentage-based voting). I would hope to combine the pirate party’s ”free our data” sentiment with some smart, transparent taxation and spending policies to make a great middle of the road political group. More on that, perhaps, coming soon.
As for their victory on such an ARRRRRRspicious day, I say to ye, HUZZAH! and YARRRR!
Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?
Check out this awesome winner of the Google Data Visualization Challenge (http://www.datavizchallenge.org/)
via The Economist
EDIT: Honorable mention - the glass half full award went to this great tool that determines what tax dollars actually went to things you like supporting: http://www.meghantosh.com/datavizchallenge/
Data Science Toolkit - Can't wait to try this
Open source, entirely self-contained VM (will also run on EC2!) of open source data tools that allow you to run a private data giant server all your own. This looks amazing, and I’m stoked to try it out for myself!
You can test out a number of different tasks on the site itself, but I also like the idea of being able to stand up a bunch of instances to crunch numbers extremely fast. Imagine using a chef script to provision on the fly to geocode and tag some massive data set!
(via FlowingData - you guys are awesome)
The government unveiled a new data source for all those geeky data heads out there - BroadbandMap.gov, which presents a bunch of previously-kept-private information about broadband penetration and usage in the United States. Pretty awesome and can’t wait to see how it’s used by the data / mash-up community.
(hat tip to betanews for the source article)
Best Companies to Work For (An Interactive)
Great interactive on the best companies to work for - zoom in to each company and key area for more details and quotes from employees.
The trustworthiness of beards… great graphic from pixelspread via one of my favorites, Flowing Data
How We Split Up the US via our Social Networks
Great article via PeteSearch via FlowingData
About Me
A strategy consultant with a passion for IT, geopolitics, economics, and the open ocean. Awed by simple, innovative solutions to difficult problems. This represents my favorite slices of the web and serves as networked storage for my brain which is now entirely pointer-based. Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization with which I may or may not be allegedly associated.
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