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 …

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 …

The Wall Street Journal recently published a table of income and unemployment data  that presented pay and employment rates for various college majors. The original study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce contained enough additional details that I thought it might be worth trying to incorporate the information …

One of the biggest barriers to introducing new concepts to people is that they often have old, preconceived notions about those concepts that are just close enough to the truth to cause confusion. For example, my company recently started a sales program that establishes performance incentives by “vertical” — one of those vague business …

I was looking at an online timeline development application from xTimelines but I couldn’t get the embedding feature to work on this site. A quick search for similar tools led me to my alma mater, of all places, where they had done a nice evaluation of alternative timeline applications. Here’s …