Charting the Old Spice Guys popularity on Twitter

This post addresses a post on Dashboard Insight’s site titled, “7 Small Business Dashboard Design Dos and Dont’s”
Hi Stacey,
I read your post with great interest, after all, who wouldn’t like to know the 7 rules of dashboard design? As soon as I got to the 19th word of your post, “colorful” I knew that we’d have some interesting differences in our viewpoints.
So let’s start with how you define a dashboard. I agree with most of your definition, especially the part about face-smacking insights. Certainly a useful dashboard should provide the …

TinkerPlots is data exploration software aimed at kids, the beautiful thing about it is that it’s great for adults too. The creators of this tool have designed the software in such a way that it gets out of your way, and encourages you to explore data, not fight with the interface.

See how bad pie charts and faulty analytics lands NYTimes blogger Nick Bilton in hot water with best selling author Seth Godin and The Business Intelligence Guru.

Education Pays!

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Fact: High school dropouts are three times more likely to be jobless than college graduates.

Fact: People with some college make 50% more than high school dropouts.

Fact: A college graduate earns almost twice as much as a high school graduate.

Click here to download this post as a pdf.

Of all the open source developer visualization tool kits I’ve seen so far, the one I stumbled upon today (thanks Moritz Stefaner), named Protovis, seems the most practical and easy to use. Protovis comes from Stanford’s visualization group, with the help of Jeff Heer and Michael Bostock.

Below is a screen grab of some of the visualizations created using Protovis.

While there are some graphs in the examples that we might want to stay away from, those radial fan (sunburst?) type charts are just plain confusing, I think the ability …

Please take some time to check out this link. It’s a lot of fun, insightful, and eye-grabbing, and there are a bunch of these beautiful, hand-drawn diagrams and charts.

A short summary about Slate’s fun and useful info viz tool about the News, named newsdots.

I came across an exciting and novel piece of visualization software this morning and wanted to share it with the group. What’s novel about the software is that it combines some of the most powerful visualization techniques in one package, with all visualizations linked to each other, kind of like what you’d see in jmp, tableau, and panopticon, but with more of an emphasis on the geographical aspect of your data. When you click a point in the scatter plot, the corresponding point(s) light up on the map, bar chart, …

Below is a data set with 4 groupings of data and 2 columns for each grouping. The summary statistics–mean, variance, correlation, sum of squares, r², and linear regression line are the same for all 4 groupings of X and Y values. If we stopped our analysis here we could move forward confidently knowing that the 4 groups of data are the same. And we’d be dead wrong.
In my 15 years in analytics I’ve seen good analysts, time and again, stop their analytical efforts when their data summaries don’t tell a …