I could not concentrate on this assignment mainly because of my 8 year old daughter being injured at the PE class recently. Her face under her eyes was cut and ended up 11 stiches being operated at the ER which suggested us that we should consider aesthetic operation after one year to reduce the visibility of the scar.

The responsible PE teacher accused me to ‘have nerves to write rude messages’ after I question the safety measures taken in the class. The vice Principal of Graham and Parks school said that ‘That is just an accident. No one is responsible. There are children breaking their legs and arms every year at schools’. Yes, indeed.

“In 2009, an estimated 2.6 million children aged 0–19 years were treated in U.S. EDs for sports- and recreation-related injuries” as “unintentional injury”. According to National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), only in 2012 (there are no figures later than that) total 573 children are injured at PE classes at schools in the US, according to the simple data search I made. Well, in 2014, one of the victims was my child.

Sorry for this highly personal and not developed assignment. This was a limited attempt to make a connection between data and human dimension.

For weeks, the only Trayvon Martin coverage I saw was on Twitter, where every progressive I knew had shared a link to the Change.org petition. Eventually, I saw more media attention around the story. This led me to form a hypothesis that people talking about the story online, and specifically, linking to the Change.org petition, kept the story alive long enough for the national media to pick up on it.

I looked into all of the data I could find, including some provided by Change.org, and found out that my hypothesis was incorrect. But the story of how Trayvon Martin became national news, weeks after his death, is still a revealing portrait of our media.

So I didn’t do a cool data project, but wanted to see what everyone thought about this one:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

It was from last year. How strong is the data and the graph?

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)