Data Points: January 2019
A roundup of random thoughts on data, information and design for the New Year. Diversity in the 116th U.S. Congress There has been a lot of discussion this week about the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of the incoming class of congress, including celebrations of firsts on the Democratic side …
Anatomy of an Analysis (Part 2) – The Enrichening
In the first part of this analysis, I turned a short list of movies into a database that could be used to answer basic questions about the list’s contents. Now I’d like to broaden this analysis by combining the original list with additional outside information — a process called data …
Anatomy of an Analysis (Part 1)
A few weeks ago, the BBC News produced a list of the top 100 greatest American films based on input from critics from around the world. Here are the top ten films presented in rank order: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, …
Trends in NFL Football Scores (Part 1)
One of the goals I set for myself this summer was to learn a bit about D3, a visualization toolkit that can be used to manipulate and display data on the web. Considering that the trees are bare and we’ve already had our first frost here in Wisconsin, you can safely assume that I …
Family Pool Trends
With the start of a rather warm, dry summer here in Wisconsin, we’ve decided to take the plunge (literally) and purchase a new above ground pool. We seem to outgrow these things every few years and I’ve become intrigued with the idea that we just keep buying larger and large …
You Are What You Watch
Experian-Simmons released some survey data in December that looked at the relative popularity of major television shows for three different political groups: liberal Democrats; conservative Republicans; and middle-of-the-road voters. Each show was given an index based on the concentration of specific voters and this information was used to create lists of …
What ‘The Office’ Gets Wrong About the Office
I start a new job next week and so I’ve been working on documenting all of my old tasks and projects in preparation for the transition. As I was going through old e-mails, I came across the introductory note my manager sent out to the department on my first day back in June …