Recap of Covering Open Space 101 Workshop

11 Sunday Feb 2018

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Civic Exchange  (思匯政策研究所,“CE” hereafter, a think tank) held a workshop on Covering Open Space 101 Workshop in HKBU on 7 Feb 2018, as a part of the collaboration with HKBU JOUR to conduct a series of investigative reports on open space in Hong Kong. CE’s researcher, Carine Lai and an experienced journalist, Christopher DeWolf, were invited to share their experience and techniques in doing open space research in Hong Kong. After the learning sessions, students tried to use the maps to practice the knowledge learned from the workshop. Here is the recap of the event.

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Data News of the Week | U.S. Gun Control Debate and the Media

08 Thursday Feb 2018

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There were more than four months after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, which is the deadliest mass shooting* committed by an individual of the States. As the largest gun-holding ratio (per capita) country around the world, USA has long been debating the gun control, yet, no consensus has been able to achieve. That’s also why media play a huge role in formulating the public debate and policy-making of gun control. We will discuss the two following reports by BBC (America’s gun culture in 10 charts) and The Telegraph (One mass shooting every day: Seven facts about gun violence in America) to illustrate the strengths and limitations of media coverage on the gun control.

*Mass shooting: When an attacker killed three or more victims in an indiscriminate rampage. Before 2013, the number was four. Continue reading →

Evaluate Bonds for Your Investment Plan

08 Thursday Feb 2018

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Summary: Everyone seeks fortune. But managing financial affairs is not an easy cook for the general public since that business jargon and the complicated fluctuations in price have confused many investors who merely have the faintest idea of investment. At this point, bonds — a fixed income investment with a defined holding period — draws the attention of many, yet a less risky basket of this kind could still be affected by the ever-changing market.

Thus, we used Python and the universally-acknowledged bond valuation method, Discounted Cash Flow (DCF), to design an efficient and easy-understanding calculator to help green hands to estimate if they can receive the expected proportion of benefit from a given bond.

Understanding Bonds: What is a Bond and How Bonds Work

“A bond is a fixed income investment in which an investor loans money to an entity which borrows the funds for a defined period of time at a fixed interest rate.”

— Investopedia.com

图片 1.png▲ A Bond’s Lifetime (Source: Vanguard)

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Recap of SCMP infographic designers’ guest lecture in HKDI

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

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Marcelo Duhalde showcases his research work behind the infographics. Photo: Zhang Ruirong

The first principle of making infographics is clearness because infographics are created for sharing, said Marcelo Duhalde, an infographic designer from SCMP as well as his colleague Marco Hernandez, invited by Hong Kong Design Institute on Feb 6.

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Tableau Student Viz Assignment Contest (Jan 8 – May 29, 2018)

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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Just created a visual for an assignment? Turn it into an awarding winning work by submitting it to the Tableau Student Vis Assignment Contest (Round II 2018)!

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(Round I First PlaceWinner, Perusing the New York Times #1 Best Seller List)

Entry Eligibility:

  • Visuals should be created in Tableau, within the period of Jan 8 – May 29, 2018.
  • Participants should be currently enrolled in a degree-granting program.
  • Dataset used should publicly accessible.
  • Submit your work by publishing your visual to your Tableau Public profile

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Create Simple Filled Map (HK) in Tableau

02 Friday Feb 2018

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Creating a filled map using JavaScript libraries might take you much time to get it work. This tutorial demonstrates how data visualization tool Tableau provide a decent and handy solution (*Note: Hong Kong Map feature is only available after version 10).

The final product can be found here: https://public.tableau.com/profile/roy.tang#!/vizhome/SimpleFilledMap/Dashboard1

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Data News of the Week | Trump Lies and His Job Promises

01 Thursday Feb 2018

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It has been more than a year under Donald Trump’s administration. Trump has made a lot of groundless claims and job promises which happen arbitrarily. Some newsagents keep a record of it and visualize the frequency. To criticise the act of the president in a more grounded way, The New York Times compares the lies frequency between Trump’s and the former president Barack Obama. We also dug deeper into one of his promises in his election platform which is job creation and employment enhancement. From which, we adopted a project from ProPublica. The following will discuss the visualization, the use of words and the effects of the two projects. 

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Calculate Marketing Objective for Your Media Startup

01 Thursday Feb 2018

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Summary: We use Python to make a financial calculator to help media startup founders to find out the break-even point of their business model. In other words, it can estimate how many visitors should they acquire to become profitable. We will also show you how to numerically solve the equation and study the sensitivity of key operating parameters, like member fee and CPM of Ads.

Start up A New Business

First of all, you should start up your new business. As all of our group members will graduate from the communication school of HKBU, we want to start up a new business together in the media industry. After doing analysis about the industry and competitors, we decided to found up a news website about new technologies, innovations and application in the media industry.

Business Model

Basically, our business model is like this. We produce high-quality content in different formats to help our target audience to know what is the newest trend and hot topic in the media industry. and on the monetization side, we have two ways to get revenues. The first is by combining ads into our website like feed ads, and the other way is by charging the subscription fee for exclusive content.

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Before we start to find investors, however, we should first get to know how much money is needed to make the website work.

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[Repost] Reflections on the talk by Prof Ikhlaq Sidhu on Artificial Intelligence

28 Sunday Jan 2018

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Prof Ikhlaq Sidhu on the DataXHKBU workshop on 26 Jan (by Xinzhi Zhang)

Note: This post was originally contributed as an entry to the Communicar Journal Blog on 28 Jan 2018. The author would like to repost it to the D&N Society]

Reflections on the talk by Prof Ikhlaq Sidhu on Artificial Intelligence

“Will AI help the film directors to make better movies? – Yes! But will AI replace the film directors and become directors? – No!” – Prof Ikhlaq Sidhu.

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Call for participants: Working with Civic Exchange, Covering Hong Kong Open Space

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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Screenshot: Carine Lai’s presentation on “Unopened Space”

Civic Exchange (思匯政策研究所,“CE” hereafter, a think tank) would like to collaborate with HKBU JOUR to make series of investigative reports on the issue of open space in Hong Kong. Basically, CE will share several datasets, and provide guidance on how to harvest other public data and how to interpret it, whereas the student teams will conduct reporting on this theme. Data journalism and data-driven storytelling are potential formats.

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