An article in the New York Times this last Tuesday cited new research that suggests we are more alert to patterns when we have seen, or experienced, something odd or uncanny. These disorienting experiences “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss,” writes Benedict Carey, the article’s author.
This reminded me of a [...]
I was interested to see if there was a visual way to get a feel for how members of congress arrayed across the political spectrum.
To do this, I thought it would be useful to mash up ratings of sitting US House and Senate members, by various interest groups. Looking for data, I found a site [...]
There are now loads of ways to create charts and graphs and publish them for consumption by others. But a big problem though is the skill set that is required to use these tools and technologies. You need a very specialized combination of business/domain knowledge, data and technical skills and graphical design abilities. If you [...]
Everyone agrees that BI (business intelligence) needs to be “easy”. But what really defines easy? And easy for whom (technical implementation and support teams, analysts and report writers or business management and decision makers?)
With all due respect, the bar is set pretty low to make things easier for technical teams—traditional BI tools are so [...]
There’s a lot of talk about “Easy BI” and “business intelligence for everyone”. And for obvious reasons: the current state of the art is hard to use and has required companies to scale up on report writers and other personnel with technical-to-business “translation” skills. This swath of infrastructure is responsible for getting still-pretty-raw data from [...]
One of the challenges of the visualization business is that ‘visualization’ means different things to different people. And naturally, people go with what they know. One of the related areas –and one more in the comfort zone of a lot of buyers—is user interface (UI) design. Good web designers should be able to create meaningful [...]
