Statistical Graphics and more

Mr. Beck’s London Tube map is a real design classic. Besides the timeless and universal design, the chosen geographical distortion has always been a point of discussion. At fourthway [via infosthetics] we find a nice animation between the “real map”, which is geographically correct and the stylized map, which is optimized for reading and aesthetics. Here […]

Thanks to the data provided by the USGS, we can take a look at all earthquakes since 1973, which cover almost the last 40 years of earthquake activity worldwide. Let’s first take a look at the yearly development of the earthquake activity overall: The apparent increase in the last 10 years is striking – though […]

This post could as well be called “Which Smartphone is right for you?”, or “Plotting conditional distribution – but the right way!”. Here is the original visualization from Nielsen, which is not really bad, but still hides the important message to some extent. Kaiser adequately pointed out that some features – important features – of […]

This is the ideal post to combine Infographics/Visualizations with the user interface aspect. I found it on Kaiser’s Junk Charts. Having spent only a few years of my life in the US and being inculturated in orderly and standardized Germany, I can tell that most faucets here come pretty close to the “should be” situation. This […]

I feel ashamed for this boring title, but hope that the entry can make up for it. This visualization did inspire me, as a comment did point to my Tour de France visualizations. As with all visualizations, we need data first – this sounds trivial, but is sometimes a frustrating show-stopper. After I found the […]

There is certainly a prerequisite for statistics we can’t get around: data. Online advertising services generate tons of it; most not accessible for the public and many probably not very interesting at all. Chitika has made one statistics public for us: the penetration of iPhones on the AT&T and Verizon network We don’t get any […]

The new issue (Vol. 21, No. 2) is out now. Featured articles are: barNest: Illustrating nested summary measures by Jim Lemon and Ofir Levy You say “graph invariant,” I say “test statistic” by Carey E. Priebe, Glen A. Coppersmith and Andrey Rukhin Computation in Large-Scale Scientific and Internet Data Applications is a Focus of MMDS 2010 […]

It is not too often that a book is published that integrates data analytical methodology and the illustration of the appropriate use of specific tools. When Henk pointed me to the just released “Data Analysis with Open Source Tools” by Philipp Janert, the excitement was big, but it evaporated as soon as I read through […]

The new version (1.2) of Mondrian adds the following (significant) features: Scatterplotsmoother now includes “principle curves“, which are one of the nonlinear generalizations of principal components. All smoothers can be plotted for subgroups, which have a color assigned, “smoother by colors“. The color scheme has been refined once again, to make use of colors as […]

We definitely live in a world of overflowing information – certainly more than a human can and wants to digest. Of course, the internet is the principal motor for this, but it also happens with the design of simple everyday’s things. Antrepo has a nice example of how product designs can be reduced to what […]

The German Bundesliga has its (very short) winter break after 17, i.e., half the games played. We all know – or at least would not disagree immediately – that good players will cost a team a fortune, and the more a team can invest, the better will be the result. Using the (potential) value of […]

I recently got my current Miles & More balance. As you might guess, I am not really a frequent flyer, at least not with Lufthansa and its allies. According to the numbers, I need 36.000 miles resp. 30 flight segments to get Frequent Traveller status. Given my currently 1.500 miles resp. 4 segments, I am […]