Statistical Graphics and more

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I was pointed to this nice video of work from Robert Kosara by Hadley via Antony. Emerging technologies – and muti-touch must be counted as such – offer new possibilities of creating an interaction with graphics. This implementation of Robert is certainly clean and straight-forward, but still raises the question, whether or not these operations […]

Special times fuel the development in specific areas. E.g., during WWII a lot of (sometimes curios) inventions and technical optimizations came up – usually not supporting humanity. The Soccer World Cup seems to spur the development of soccer visualizations and sports visualizations in general. My favorite (and apparently not only mine) one is this overview: Querying […]

It was at the 1997 JSM in Anaheim, CA, when I peeked into one of the seminar rooms, and found the continuing presentation of the ASA graphics video library. Although, most of the movies are not really new, they are still very inspiring and interesting to watch. One of my favorites is Bill Eddy’s air […]

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: […]

When Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPad, many of us expected some disruptive move regarding the user interface. In fact, there was nothing revolutionary new in comparison to the iPhone – yes, the iPad is bigger. There is one thing to keep in mind, though. The computer in its current form is a general purpose […]

It is just about a year ago (exactly January 6th, 2009) that a New York Times article on R did fuel the dispute on what statistical analysis tool is “the best”. One of the highlight of the article was a quote from SAS’ Anne H. Milley: “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end […]