26 August 2012

Money Makes the World Go Round

It's been a while since I've vented about the silliness of the DNC in turning down the Triage application; in particular the mapping part. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a US map half done in today's Times. It's half done, since it displays the input, $$$, but doesn't show the output, it seems. Again, in Triage terms, output would be some measure of effectiveness. Can be done, as Triage demonstrated.

To be fair, it may not even be the Times who did the work. The source cite is "Campaign Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media", but doesn't say whether Kantar provided only the raw numbers, or both the numbers and the map. Since the Times is well known to use R for its data graphics, my guess is the former. The states are graphed with their blue/red leaning (without indicating whether the lean was measured correlatively with the spends), so a time series of the map would be closer to the real time thrust of Triage (googleVis supports such graph animation, sort of; R-bloggers has a number of posts on point). Even so, bravo.

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