Via Twitter, Bart S (@BartSchuijt) sent me to this TechCrunch article, which contains several uninspiring charts. The most disturbing one is this: There is a classic Tufte class here: only five numbers and yet the chart is so confusing. And...
Via Twitter, Bart S (@BartSchuijt) sent me to this TechCrunch article, which contains several uninspiring charts. The most disturbing one is this: There is a classic Tufte class here: only five numbers and yet the chart is so confusing. And...
Theranos (v): to spin stories that appeal to data while not presenting any data To be Theranosed is to fall for scammers who tell stories appealing to data but do not present any actual data. This is worse than story time, in which the storyteller starts out with real data but veers off mid-stream into unsubstantiated froth, hoping you and I got carried away by the narrative flow. Theranos (n):…
Last year, Gizmodo capitalized on the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal and published a sensational article claiming the website that, if you haven't heard, promotes adultery, has "almost no" real women on it. The subtext is that millions of gullible, disloyal males were paying monthly fees to the website to do nothing or, cue the laugh track, to converse with "badly-designed robots." These men, according to Gizmodo, were…
Last year, Gizmodo capitalized on the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal and published a sensational article claiming the website that, if you haven't heard, promotes adultery, has "almost no" real women on it. The subtext is that millions of gullible, disloyal males were paying monthly fees to the website to do nothing or, cue the laugh track, to converse with "badly-designed robots." These men, according to Gizmodo, were…
A reader didn't like this graphic in the Wall Street Journal: One could turn every panel into a bar chart but unfortunately, the situation does not improve much. Some charts just can't be fixed by altering the visual design. The...
There is a healthy debate going on about last night's Michigan primary on the Democratic side, in which Bernie Sanders pulled off a major upset. Polls leading up to the primary put Hillary Clinton ahead by about 20 percent points. That would be a huge margin. Fivethirtyeight, which has been doing a stellar job covering the elections, uses polls heavily in generating forecasts, and they had predicted that Clinton would…
Investors of Herbalife (HLF) are owed a full explanation of the metrics disaster that the management disclosed suddenly to the SEC last week. As a regulator, the SEC should be requesting much more information about what happened. (Click on the 8K filed in March 2016. Here is the LA Times article.) On Feb 25, Herbalife management held an earnings call to discuss 2015 4th quarter and full year results. Investors…
The news is out that Uber got fined by the New York Attorney General's office for data breaches and privacy concerns. The headline writer for ZDNet nailed this one: "Uber fined peanuts in God View surveillance" (link). And the sub-lead has the kicker: "For a company with a valuation of over $50 billion, a $20,000 fine over user data protection is laughable." This settlement tells us one of the following…
Old-timer Chris P. sent me to this Bloomberg article about Vanguard ETFs and low-cost funds (link). The article itself is interesting, and I will discuss it on the sister blog some time in the future. Chris is impressed with this...
It appears that Google Flu Trends (GFT) has slipped quietly into the night. In a short post to the Google Research blog, the team behind GFT announced that they are "no longer publishing" flu estimates, effectively ending the seven-year-old experiment. The GFT home page now links to some historical datasets. The post was dated August 15, and it appears that mainstream media completely missed it. GFT was one of the…
