Archive for February, 2016

HOPs, Skips, and Jumps to Silly Visualizations

Wednesday, February 24th, 2016

A few days ago, I received an email from a professor who teaches information visualization about a recent research study titled “Hypothetical Outcome Plots Outperform Error Bars and Violin Plots for Inferences About Reliability of Variable Ordering.” The study, done by Jessica Hullman, Paul Resnick, and Eytan Adar, was published by the journal PLOS ONE […]

The PBS (Public Bullshit) of Big Data

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2016

Tomorrow, February 24, PBS will air a new documentary titled “The Human Face of Big Data.” I’m a longtime supporter of PBS, but on occasion they get it wrong (e.g., when they provide a showcase for charlatans such as Deepak Chopra). In this new documentary, they apparently get much of it wrong by putting a […]