Data Junkie

Cool graph, but where’d the data come from?

December 29, 2008

Below is a nifty graph which I first saw displayed in a post by Clay Shirky at boingboing. The graph shows the annual return on the S&P stock index for every year going back to 1825.  The heavy black line in the middle represents a zero return; if a year is listed to the right [...]

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Lottery winners not so miserable after all

December 8, 2008
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Over the past few years, I've heard or read a number of stories of lottery winners who, soon after winning the lottery, end up bankrupt, miserable, and with a long list of relationships that were destroyed by the lottery winner's sudden wealth. This sad outcome generally comes about through general ignorance about basic financial management, [...]

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Questionable numbers: US Chamber of Commerce

October 10, 2008

David Kravets of Wired magazine has an interesting post on a number that has made its way into a US Chamber of Commerce letter to the president, encouraging him to sign into law a bill focused on stronger enforcement of intellectual property law, including the creation of a cabinet-level "copyright czar" to oversee these efforts. [...]

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Famous people commissioning surveys: The Dilbert Guy

October 10, 2008

Rock musician Trent Reznor wasn't the only famous person who recently conducted a survey. Scott Adams, creator of the well-known comic strip "Dilbert," decided he wanted some "useful and unbiased information about which candidate has the best plans for the economy" and decided the best way to get that information was to ask a bunch [...]

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Famous people commissioning surveys: Trent Reznor

October 5, 2008

During the month of September, 2008, at least two famous people did something that famous people don't often do: they surveyed a bunch of people to find out something they wanted to know. One of these famous people is Trent Reznor, of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. (The other is Scott Adams, creator [...]

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A plug for “The Science of Fear”

September 25, 2008

I very much enjoyed "The Science of Fear," partly because I work in a field that's specifically about accurately describing things based on hard data, but also because I just like knowing that my assessment of reality actually matches reality, or at least as much as it can in an an uncertain world. Gardner's basic [...]

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World of Warcraft and scientific habits of mind

September 11, 2008

Clive Thompson of Wired Magazine points us to an interesting paper soon to be published in the Journal of Science & Technology. It's titled Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds, and it presents the results of an analysis that two University of Wisconsin researchers performed on a sample of posts to a World of [...]

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Program evaluation and investigative journalism

August 27, 2008

It has been widely reported that traditional newspapers are struggling mightily of late, largely because of the proliferation of news sources made possible by the internet (e.g., blogs, Google News, Twitter, etc.). Mike Masnick of Techdirt points us to an article in the New York Times that highlights a business model that is an alternative [...]

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DirecTV’s deceptive charts

July 23, 2008

Speaking of charts and clear communication, here's a reminder that there are some who use charts in a way that can be deceptive. Dennis Donovan, a math teacher at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, MA, points out that a graph on the DirecTV.com home page (scroll to the bottom) offers a good example of [...]

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Seth Godin, charts, and clear communication

July 16, 2008

Seth Godin, marketing guru and well-known author of numerous business books, recently wrote a pair of blog posts that caused something of a stir among "data presentation purists," by asserting, among other things, that it would be better if people NEVER used bar graphs in powerpoint presentations. Actually his first post, The three laws of [...]

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