Consider this paragraph from a FiveThirtyEight article about the small-schools movement (my italics): Hanushek calculated the economic value of good and bad teachers, combining the “quality” of a teacher — based on student achievement on tests — with the lifetime earnings of an average American entering the workforce. He found that a very high-performing teacher with a class of 20 students could raise her pupils’ average lifetime earnings by as…
Cross-post on my two blogs Here is something different: I wrote a piece on exam-taking tips. It's on a new website, Cafe, which has lots of good (non-quant) reads. The motivation for the piece is my observation that most American students are not taught how to take exams. As a professor, I notice that many students get lower scores than they deserve because of this. In this article, I describe…
Here is something different: I wrote a piece on exam-taking tips. It's on a new website, Cafe, which has lots of good (non-quant) reads. The motivation for the piece is my observation that most American students are not taught how...
Alberto Cairo, Stephen McDaniel and I were asked about our "favorite" data visualization at the Qlik Conference this week. Stephen wrote up our answers here.
Reader Aaron W. came across this "Facts and Figures" infographic about Boise State University that seemingly is aimed at alumni of the school. Given that Boise State has a good reputation for analytics, Aaron found it disconcerting to see such...
Alberto Cairo just gave a wonderful talk to my workshop, in which he complains about the state of dataviz teaching. So, it's quite opportune that reader Maja Z. sent in a couple of examples from a recent course on data...
I have earlier reported that Princeton's new President has initiated a review of their "grade deflation" policy that was put in almost ten years ago. As you may recall (link), grading in U.S. colleges has become a farce: at top-tier schools, getting an A means you are an average student; not getting an A is many times more informative than getting an A. The new administration at Princeton has now…
COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT THE ART OF DATA VISUALIZATION Fall 2014 (Oct 6 - Nov 24, Mondays 6:30-9:30) New York University Instructor: Kaiser Fung Location: New York City Learn how to make knock-out data visualization in an innovative, immersive and fun setting,...
This chart published in Harvard Magazine has won my heart. It is well executed in many ways. The chart illustrates a study of time spent by assistant and associate professors. It focuses specifically on time spent working versus time spent...
As if we need more evidence. The statistics community loves to think of our subject as highly practical and relevant to the general population. And this is true. The average person has a poor grasp of basic statistical thinking, even if he or she has taken one or more statistics courses. This is true, yet many in our community are in denial. Chapter 1 of Numbers Rule Your World deals…
