Statistical Graphics and more

… would have been the better title for the book “Graphics of Large Datasets“. As the book was published a few years before the birth of the next buzz word promoted by McKinsey with the white paper “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity“, we just did not know better. But to be […]

You might ask yourself what the book of the Google chairman Eric Schmidt has to do on a statistics blog. Well, Google’s success was based on doing the “right statistics” on the “right data” at the “right time”. And not to mention Hal Varian (Google’s Chief Economist) who said: “I keep saying the sexy job in […]

Developing software in academia usually does not lead to commercial products, and if the intention is just this, the academic qualities often fail to reach common standards. Nonetheless, there is always the hope that commercial products might pick up the ideas generated in academic software projects. Being involved in many software projects on (interactive) statistical […]

It is not too often that a book is published that integrates data analytical methodology and the illustration of the appropriate use of specific tools. When Henk pointed me to the just released “Data Analysis with Open Source Tools” by Philipp Janert, the excitement was big, but it evaporated as soon as I read through […]

WILEY’s Interdisciplinary Reviews are positioned as “WIREs publications focus on high-profile research areas at the interfaces of the traditional disciplines.” Currently there are six areas covered Climate Change Cognitive Science Computational Statistics Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology RNA Systems Biology and Medicine and five other fields (including Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery) upcoming in 2011 and 2012. […]

This post is neither fish nor fowl. My review on Kaiser’s book is way overdue, as I got stuck somewhere in the middle of the book. In the meantime, Georgios pointed me to this video of David McCandless on TED, as we recently talked about people’s fears and how the media has its share in it […]

Parallel coordinate displays are popular – especially in InfoVis – for quite a while. Now we have the ultimate reference with Al Inselberg‘s book (not surprisingly) called “Parallel Coordinates“. Al Inselberg giving a talk at the DataVis workshop in Berlin 2006 Most of the book actually looks at geometric properties of parallel coordinates, and thus […]

I got my copy of Dona Wong’s “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures” two weeks ago and it is time to post a comment now … The book is a typical “How to”-book and like many other books (e.g., Graphing Statistics & Data: […]

As statisticians we are used to the fact that we have a hard time analyzing data where we lack the knowledge of the background. Election data are a common target in statistical investigations and some of us can not be stopped talking about red and blue states over and over again. Having won this book […]

Exploring Geovisualization is a collection of articles from experts of many fields that use or support geo applications. Will be out the next weeks. This is what the publisher writes: Sophisticated interactive maps are increasingly used to explore information – guiding us through data landscapes to provide information and prompt insight and understanding. Geovisualization is […]

I just got Howard Wainer’s latest book Graphic Discovery. Didn’t read very much yet, but it looks like an interesting collection of examples. I do not expect anything new from the book, but inspiration is always welcome.