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Silk Insights

@silkinsights / silkinsights.tumblr.com

Silk is a data analysis, publishing, and visualization platform. We cover politics, tech, economy, culture. You can browse a Silk to explore data and create interactive charts and maps. www.silk.co

In today's latest celebrity feud, Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj engage in a Twitter exchange after a VMA snub, propelling Twitter into conversations around race and gender. Swift’s Twitter account ranks as the fourth most popular one with 60.8 million followers, while Minaj lags behind with 19.8 million.

What does it take to be a Twitter Rockstar? 

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Announcing Silk Summer Webinars: First up, data extraction with Import.io

We are excited to announce the launch of Silk.co Webinars. For the first batch we are doing a three part series.

What: There are great stories buried in the large amount of data that gets published on the web every day. In this three-part Silk.co webinar series, we’ll learn how to:

  1. Find and extract data
  2. Clean the dataset
  3. Analyze and visualize the data

The end result will be a provocative data journalism story, published on the free data publishing platform Silk.

Part 1 - Finding and extracting data: Our first guest will be Alex Gimson from data extraction company Import.io. Alex has used Import.io to help hundreds of organizations (including Oxfam, The Guardian, and others)) extract relevant data from public websites such as AirBnB, Zillow and many others.

Cost: Free. Both Silk and Import.io are free tools.

Sign up: Please sign up here. You will get an invitation by email for every webinar, and a recap with links to the webinars on Youtube.

Who should attend: Data journalists, market researchers, spreadsheet users, and anyone else who has looked at data on a website and thought there was a story trapped in there somewhere.

When: The first session, on finding and extracting data, will be on July 22nd, 12-1 pm EDT / 9-10am PDT.

Please also invite friends and colleagues because they might learn useful skills from this webinar.

See you soon,

Jurian from Silk.co

Prominent voices in tech journalism are criticizing the global startup community for building software products and services that cater to the 1 percent or have zero societal value. They claim that curated shopping services are not really revolutionary; that food delivery services aren’t changing the world; and that ridesharing is nice but not exactly earth-shattering. And, clearly, building ways to sell more ads adds nothing to the global karmic bottom line. However, in my world, I see numerous critical tools and services coming from startups that have world-changing potential. These tools and services help mere mortals wrangle data and use it to greater effect. Data is power. Those who can wield data effectively or collect data where previously it was unavailable can fight powerful monied adversaries and force social change. We call it the “data revolution.” It’s a real thing and it will leave a tremendous positive legacy for the world.

The gender ratio of women and men Film School graduates is quite balanced. However women end up being significantly underrepresented in the industry. For example, no women has ever won an Academy Award for Cinematography. And Kathryn Bigelow has been the only female director to win an Oscar. Not a surprise, given that there have ever been only 4 women nominated for Best Director... against 425 men!

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Over the last decade, economic growth lifted almost a billion people around the world out of extreme poverty. Unfortunately, it didn’t lift them very far.

A rising economic tide has been concentrated in just a few regions of the world, and it’s failed to raise many people into the middle class.

By U.S. standards, most of the world remains terribly poor.

“If we look at the income distribution of the world population, the vast majority is living [on] $2 to $4 per day,” says Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research and economist at the Pew Research Center. Kochhar is one of the authors of the new report“A Global Middle Class is More Promise than Reality.”

The study looks at changes in economic status around the world between 2001 and 2011. How many people in impoverished Burundi, for instance, were considered “low income” in 2001 versus a decade earlier? How many people in booming Uruguay rose to the “upper-middle income” category?

And while there’s been a lot of improvement at the very bottom of the economic ladder recently, Kochhar and his colleagues find that only 13 percent of the world’s population is now “middle class.”

Source: NPR