There have been few updates as I was working on things for other people. One of these things showed up today. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of my new article on HBR: For over 10 years and at three companies, I set up and ran A/B testing programs, in which we test a new offer with half a sample against a control group which doesn’t get a new…
This chart cited by ZeroHedge feels like a parody. It's a bar chart that doesn't utilize the length of bars. It's a dot plot that doesn't utilize the position of dots. The range of commute times (between city centers and...
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.
What a lucky day I found time to catch up on some Gelman. He posted about the Facebook research ethics controversy, and I'm glad to see that he and I have pretty much the same attitude (my earlier post is here.). It's a storm in a teacup. Gelman makes two other points about the Facebook study--unrelated to the ethics--which are very important. First, he said: if we happen to see…
I had the pleasure of visiting the Facebook data science team last week, and we spent some time chatting about visual communication, something they care as much about as I do. Solomon reported about our conversation in this blog post....
Andrew Gelman touches on one of my favorite topics: prediction accuracy, and experts who cling to their predictions. Here's Andrew at the Monkey Cage blog. His starting point is a piece by sociologist Jay Livingston on how various well-known economists made vague predictions (e.g. "I see inflation around the corner") and kept clinging to them (eventually, there will be inflation). Several theories are given to explain this behavior. One is…
RealClimate (link) deserves a pie in the face for printing a set of pie charts. (Thanks to @guitarzan for the tip.) This is a case of the chart telling a different story from the data. Let's look at one of...
Here are five amazing recommendations by Avinash Kaushik from a post about how to make Web analytics dashboards better by simplifying. Dashboards are not reports. Don't data puke. Include insights. Include recommendations for actions. Include business impact. NEVER leave data interpretation to the executives (let them opine on your recommendations for actions with benefit of their wisdom and awareness of business strategy). When it comes to key performance indicators, segments…
Binging on Gelman again while I was traveling. Here is a gem (link). If you ever dreamed of having "all the data", be sure to give this a read and give it a few moments' thought. Skim through the main post quickly. The good stuff is in the comments.
