The School of Data

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Here’s a fantastic initiative by the Open Knowledge Foundation. (Disclosure: I’m on the OKF’s Advisory Board). What lies behind it is an awareness that there’s a huge — and growing — skills gap in data-analysis, visualisation, etc.

To address this growing demand, the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU are collaborating to create the School of Data.

The School of Data will adopt the successful peer-to-peer learning model established by P2PU and Mozilla in their ‘School of Webcraft’ partnership. Learners will progress by taking part in ‘learning challenges’ – series of structured, achievable tasks, designed to promote collaborative and project-based learning.

As learners gain skills, their achievements will be rewarded through assessments which lead to badges. Community support and on-demand mentoring will also be available for those who need it.

So What Next?

In order to get the School of Data up and running, the next challenges are:

To create a series of learning challenges for a Data Wrangling 101 course. Developing Data wranglers will learn to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.

To recruit community leaders to act as ‘mentors’, providing community support and on-demand mentoring for those who need it.

To curate, update and extend the existing manuals and reference materials, e.g. the Open Data Handbook and the Data Patterns Handbook etc.

To design and implement assessments which evaluate achievements. Badges can then be issued which recognize the relevant skills and competencies.

To openly license all education content (challenges, manuals, references and materials) so that anyone can use, modify and re-use it, including instructors and learners in formal education.

Get the word out! Promote Data Wrangling 101 to potential participants.

Get Involved!

At this stage, the OKF is seeking volunteers to help develop the project. Whether you would like to design educational materials, construct learning challenges, donate money or mentor on the course, we’d love to hear from you! Equally, if you are part of an organisation which would like to join with the Open Knowledge Foundation and P2PU to collaborate on the School of Data, please do get in touch by registering on the form at the end of the link.

That awkward question

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Uncomfortable questions from David Pogue following on from the NYT’s big story on conditions in Chinese electronics factories.

It’s safe to say that most electronics sold in the United States are made in these Chinese factories.

So yes, we should pressure Apple to continue putting pressure on Foxconn. But at the same time, we seem to be ignoring a much bigger and more important question: How much do we care?

That Chinese workers are paid less than American workers is no big shock. We’ve known that forever. That’s why everybody outsources to China in the first place. There’s a long list of Chinese manufacturing costs that are lower than American manufacturing costs: hourly employee rates, worker benefits, taxes, the cost of power, buildings and equipment, and more.

Bringing workplace standards and pay in Chinese factories up to American levels would, of course, raise the price of our electronics. How much is hard to say, but a financial analyst for an outsourcing company figures a $200 iPhone might cost $350 if it were built here.

Do we care enough about Chinese factory conditions to pay nearly twice as much for our phones, tablets, cameras, TVs, computers, GPS units, camcorders, music players, DVD players, DVRs, networking gear and stereo equipment?

Good piece, and those of us who cheerfully live inside the Apple ecosystem are all a bit compromised. But there is one aspect of the question that Pogue omits, namely the extraordinarily high margins that Apple squeezes from its products.

Lie (back) and think of England

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I know nothing about football, but I do know about the mass media and I’ve been studying the feeding frenzy about Fabio Capello, Harry Redknapp and the newly-vacant post of England manager. My conclusion: Redknapp would have to be clinically insane to put himself forward for the job. This has nothing to do with football, and all to do with the British tabloids, which have a standard operating procedure for this kind of stuff. Here’s the algorithm:

1. Inflate — to ludicrous degrees — public expectations about England’s prospects for winning the forthcoming European/World championship (delete as appropriate) .
2. At the same time, intrude on the Manager’s private life by tapping his phone, intercepting his email, harassing his family and friends, etc. etc. (And yah, boo, sucks to Lord Leveson and his ‘inquiry’).
3. Then, when the England squad crashes and burns, turn on the hapless ‘manager’ with a spiteful fury that might have staggered even Shakespeare.
4. Make hysterical calls for the sacking of said Manager.
5. Go to 1.

Davos, 1472

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Just caught up with this lovely dispatch from Davos by Jeff Jarvis.

I began this trip to Europe with my pilgrimage to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz (blogged earlier). I recall Jon Naughton’s Observer column in which he asked us to imagine that we are pollsters in Mainz in 1472 asking whether we thought this invention of Gutenberg’s would disrupt the Catholic church, fuel the Reformation, spark the Scientific Revolution, change our view of education and thus childhood, and change our view of societies and nations and cultures. Pshaw, they must have said.

Ask those questions today. How likely do you think it is that every major institution of society–every industry, all of education, all of government–will be disrupted; that we will rethink our idea of nations and cultures; that we will reimagine education; that we will again alter even economics? Pshaw?

Welcome to Davos 1472.

Let us spray

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The graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s first proper ‘corporate’ office in 2005 was offered $60,000 to do the job but opted for stock instead. That stock is supposedly worth $500m now. Smart lad. Smarter than Stanford, which was offered Cisco stock many years ago, but opted for cash instead.

Apple: ARMing OS X

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Fascinating piece by Charles Arthur in the Guardian pondering the implications of revelations that Apple has been porting OS X to the ARM chip.

Written by Tristan Schaap, the paper describes working in the PTG [Apple’s Platform Technologies Group] for 12 weeks, porting Darwin to the MV88F6281 – an ARMv5-compatible processor that’s a couple of generations old now. They were then porting Snow Leopard, aka 10.6; Mac OS X is now onto 10.7 (“Lion”), released last year.

“The goal of this project was to get Darwin building and booting into a full multi-user prompt,” Schaap wrote in the introduction that’s generally visible on the DUT page.

But in the paper he goes significantly further: “The goal of this project is to get Darwin into a workable state on the MV88F6281 processor so that other teams can continue their work on this platform.” Emphasis added. That tells you: Apple is working on porting Mac OS X to ARM, and thus giving itself fresh options if the ARM architecture – known for its low power demands, but equally not until now seen as a competitor in processing heft to Intel – starts offering the horsepower users need.

And there have been indications that ARM is moving up the horsepower ratings, even while Intel tries to lower the floor on its chips’ power consumption.

Sky News clamps down on Twitter use

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It’s Back to the Future time, folks. This intriguing story from the Guardian

Sky News has told its journalists not to repost information from any Twitter users who are not an employee of the broadcaster.

An email to staff on Tuesday laid out new social media guidelines for Sky News employees, including a contentious ban on retweeting rival “journalists or people on Twitter”.

The new guidelines also warn Sky News journalists to “stick to your own beat” and not to tweet about non-work subjects from their professional accounts.

So much for the link economy, then. But the Digger’s (surprisingly entertaining) Twitterstream will, presumably, be exempt from the ban.

Facebook’s dodgy stats

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Well, well. Facebook’s IPO Prospectus claims 845 million users, which is probably true. But it also claims that the number of “daily active users” is a whopping 483 million. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times found that number hard to swallow, so he went digging. And guess what? That number includes people like me who are registered Facebook users but almost never visit the site.

Facebook counts as “active” users who go to its Web site or its mobile site. But it also counts an entire other category of people who don’t click on facebook.com as “active users.” According to the company, a user is considered active if he or she “took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party Web site that is integrated with Facebook.”

Come again?

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on NFL.com, for example, you’re an “active user” of Facebook. Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You’re an active Facebook user. If you’ve logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site — and your comment was automatically shared on Facebook — you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.

“Think of what this means in terms of monetizing their ‘daily users,’ ” Barry Ritholtz, the chief executive and director for equity research for Fusion IQ, wrote on his blog. “If they click a ‘like’ button but do not go to Facebook that day, they cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services. All they did was take advantage of FB’s extensive infrastructure to tell their FB friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they liked something online. Period.”

Facebook appears to be using the term “active” as a euphemism for “engaged” rather than how many users are actually going to its site every month.

I count as an “active user” because I’ve arranged for my Twitter stream to be fed to my Facebook account as a set of status updates. But as a member of Facebook’s advertising ecosystem I’m a dead loss because I never see an ad.