The world is flat? Only for US students

Learning and teaching has become a global endeavor with lots of online resources and technologies. Contests are an effective way to engage a diverse community from around the world. In the past I have written several posts about contests and competitions in data mining, statistics and more. And now about a new one.

Tableau is a US-based company that sells a cool data visualization tool (there's a free version too). The company has recently seen huge growth with lots of new adopters in industry and academia. Their "Tableau for teaching" (TfT) program is intended to assist instructors and teachers by providing software and resources for data visualization courses. The program is promoted as global "Tableau for Teaching Around the World" (see the interactive dashboard at the bottom of this post). As part of this program, a student contest was recently launched where students are provided with real data and are challenged to produce good visualizations that tell compelling stories. The data are from Lesotho, Africa (given by the NGO CARE) and the prizes are handsome. I was almost getting excited about this contest (non-US data, visualization, nice prizes for students) when I read the draconian contest eligibility rules:

ELIGIBILITY: The Tableau Student Data Challenge Contest (“The Awards,” “Contest” or “Promotion”) is offered and open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia (“United States”) who at time of entry (a) are the legal age of majority in their state of residence; (b) physically reside in the United States; (c) are enrolled as a college or university accredited in the United States; and (d) are not an Ineligible Person

I was deeply disappointed. Not only does the contest exclude non-US students (even branches of US universities outside of the US are excluded!), but more disturbing is the fact that only US residents can win a prize for telling a story about lives of people in Lesotho. Condescending? Wouldn't local Lesotho students (or at least students in the region) be the most knowledgeable about the meaning of the data? Wouldn't they be the ones most qualified to tell the story of Lesotho people that emerges from the data? Wouldn't they be the first to identify surprising patterns or exceptions and even wrong data?

While one country "telling the story" of another country is common at the political level, there is no reason that open-minded private visualization software companies should endorse the same behavior. If the problem of awarding cash prizes to non-US citizens is tax-related, I am sure there are creative ways, such as giving free software licenses, to offer prizes that can be distributed to any enthusiastic and talented student of visualization around the world. In short, I call Tableau to change the rules and follow CARE's motto "Defending Dignity".

Powered by Tableau

Analytics: You want to be in Asia

Business Intelligence and Data Mining have become hot buzzwords in the West. Using Google Insights for Search to "see what the world is searching for" (see image below), we can see that the popularity of these two terms seems to have stabilized (if you expand the search to 2007 or earlier, you will see the earlier peak and also that Data Mining was hotter for a while). Click on the image to get to the actual result, with which you can interact directly. There are two very interesting insights from this search result:

1. Looking at the "Regional Interest" for these terms, we see that the #1 country searching for these terms is India! Hong Kong and Singapore are also in the top 5. A surge of interest in Asia!
2. Adding two similar terms that have the term Analytics, namely Business Analytics and Data Analytics, unveils a growing interest in Analytics (whereas the two non-analytics terms have stabilized after their peak).

What to make of this? First, it means Analytics is hot. Business Analytics and Data Analytics encompass methods for analyzing data that add value to a business or any other organization. Analytics includes a wide range of data analysis methods, from visual analytics to descriptive and explanatory modeling, and predictive analytics. From statistical modeling, to interactive visualization (like the one shown here!), to machine-learning algorithms and more. Companies and organizations are hungry for methods that can turn their huge and growing amounts of data into actionable knowledge. And the hunger is most pressing in Asia.

Click on the image to refresh the Google Insight for Search result (in a new window)