Statistical Graphics and more

It is a common theme when statisticians look at data visualization output – they ask for the model. Although I am usually not an unconditional friend of building models (especially before you understand the data), but I feel the need for some kind of model in order to make this visualization more than just a […]

The study by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society (SIQSS) has its 10th anniversary now as I stumbled over a new study by the German ifo-Institut, looking into the same topic a decade later. The SIQSS study states: – Internet isolates people – Internet allows work to intrude into home – Internet […]

I recently stumbled upon an old paper of a presentation I gave at the Interface conference in 1998, entitled “JAVA – the next Generation of Statistical Computing?”: It is very interesting to compare the things I envisioned 12 years ago and what actually came true. Here are some topics: Did Java change a whole lot […]

The last Good & Bad post already dealt with using ranks and certain related problems, but the thing Udo pointed me to is really of extraordinary absurdity. The Daily Mail has a feature about the most popular names: The problem is already explained in the footnote such that I don’t need to comment any further […]

There is an impressive 54 minute documentary on “visualization in the media” at datajournalism.stanford.edu. The site also has quite a bit additional material literally around the video. The story seems to be tailored around (or at least crosses it every now and then) the paper by Segel and Heer. Here are some significant quotes (with […]

Presenting at the Dutch Chemometrics Society annual meeting late May this year, I heard a talk of Klaas Faber on the “Athletes Biological Passport” – especially targeting the Pechstein case. Now that the Swiss court finally confirms the ruling, things popped up again. Faber, being the expert of Pechstein, talks about “torture the data until they […]

Stephen Few posted this illustration of the typical BI process on his site: I largely agree with Stephen on the different steps, which are very similar to any kind of data analysis process (you will probably leave out the “integrate”, “store” and “report” step in a non-BI / non-datawarehouse environment). But there is one crucial point […]

This graphics was in the current newsletter of the local utility company, and shows the (estimated) water consumption during the quarter final of the soccer world cup between Germany and Argentina. I think there is no need to translate the annotations, and everybody might guess what the beer drinking people of Germany did during the […]

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 […]

Andrew pointed to a blog post on his blog, by Panos Ipeirotis who asked the question, why we do not use peer reviewing for conference talks in the same way we are used to it for journal papers. His idea (which is not coming up the first time, and this year’s InfoVis worked pretty much this […]

I stumbled upon this “survey analysis” on an Apple related list called “iPad Opinion Profile – iPad Personality Clash: Elites vs. Geeks”. The brief summary of this survey suggests that iPad owners are “Selfish Elites” and those who oppose the iPad are “Independent Geeks”. It takes a bit to get an idea of what these […]

I was a bit puzzled when I read the lines in Robert’s hint to the InfoVis Workshop called “Telling Stories with Data“, saying: “If you haven’t watched the Hans Rosling video yet, you probably haven’t realized that visualization isn’t just there for data analysis, it’s also a great tool for telling stories.” This is exactly […]