The “Break it Down” Blog

Google, using it’s insane computing infrastructure, has offered to begin hosting terabytes upon terabytes (likely petabytes when done?) of public scientific data so the community has easier/central access to the information. The project is named Palimpsest.

Google also purchased the visualization group behind the Gapminder software (see Ted Talk video, very interesting) that was designed to collect disparate bits of information from many different data sources and then analyze it, creating animated representations of the information in an easy-to-understand fashion.

Some of the examples given in Hans’s talk were visualizing the economic standing of the world’s population since 1960 to 2005 and then breaking huge groupings (like “Africa”) apart into sub-groups that represented the major living areas and then impose those more accurately back ontop of the world’s economic situation.

There were also other correlations like health of citizens depending on income level in countries across the world and education levels. It was very interesting information that is simply not parseable or understandable without software like Gapminder to visualize and make sense of it.

This move by Google could revolutionize the information that is not just available, but understood in the public sector. There could be huge correlations between our health and life styles (for example) that we simply are not aware of because the data has not been connected yet. For example, death rates and diet soda consumption (I’m just giving an example).

I’ll be fascinated to see what comes out of this project.