Photo by Mitchell Gerskup

Kaggle – A site dedicated to improving our data analysis algorithms by running frequent Netflix-style contests. Both the data providers and the scientists win, I think this is an excellent idea and I’m pleased to see it looks like there’s been a lot of uptake – via Anthony Goldbloom

Storytelling, statistics and other grave insults – “Statistics is often too dry and too abstract for us to understand intuitively, to generate that comfortable internal feeling of understanding“. There’s a lot of truth in this analysis of how we crave, and believe, narratives. Stories persuade in a way that numbers don’t.

The Illogicality of Stock-Brokers – In a similar vein, this study shows how even experts let their intuition override basic logic. The authors experimented by posing trading questions to experienced stockbrokers, and found that the plausibility of the answer strongly determined whether they chose it, even if applying simple logic would clearly show it was wrong. More evidence that we rely more on our pattern-matching skills than our rationality when making decisions – via FreeExchange

myWorld Demo – The web opens up so many ways of putting advanced geo tools like this into the hands of everyday people – via Peter Batty

Datavis Tumblr – Beautiful examples of data visualization – via Julian Green