Archive for March, 2009

Do We Really Need More Data?

Monday, March 30th, 2009

The notion that “we need more data” seems to have always served as a fundamental assumption and driver of the data warehousing and business intelligence industries. It is true that a missing piece of information can at times make the difference between a good or bad decision, but there is another truth that we must […]

Failures in Analysis Are Failures in Thinking

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer, Jr., Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1999. In any field of study, among the many written works that inform it there are a few that stand out as pillars of wisdom. In the field of data analysis, one of those pillars is the book Psychology of […]

Looking at Data with R

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

One of the tools that statisticians often use to visually explore, analyze, and present data is the free open-source product called R. Like several of the tools that statisticians use, it requires a fair amount of training to learn R, but once you’ve learned it, you have a great deal of power and flexibility at […]

Designing the User Interface

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Designing the User Interface, 5th Edition Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant, Addison-Wesley, 2009 Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland’s HCIL (Human-Computer Interaction Lab) contacted me recently to say that he and co-author Catherine Plaisant have recently revised their excellent book Designing the User Interface. This new edition, due to be released this month, has […]