Opinion
A Robot Reporter?
Radiolab and Wired magazine each ran a story recently about a computer program they called a “robot scientist”. Its actual name is Eureqa. The Radio Lab story gave a compelling portrait of Eureqa’s capabilities. Just by looking at how a double pendulum moves Eureqa was able to deduce Newton’s famous law of motion “F=ma“.... »
5 Stories: Bipartsian ObamaCare Support
Now that health care has passed with no Republican support it’s natural to ask whether this represents a Democratic takeover of government. Fortunately we don’t have to rely on the word of our elected legislators to shed light on this issue, there is another way. This is the last of the 5 Stories articles. ... »
5 Stories: Economic Cliff
When the current recession started back in late 2008 many economists, bankers and politicians described the situation in very vivid language. “The economy is going over a cliff” many of them said, yet no visual image accompanied those words. In a world where newsrooms are comfortable with infographics quotes from experts like “The economy... »
5 Stories: Health Expense
The hardest “easy” story around probably is “where does the US spend its health care money?” Easy because the US has by far the most expensive health care system in the world. One would expect that finding the areas where our spending is significantly higher than other countries would be easy. Easier than finding... »
5 Stories: Heart and Sleep
Recently ABC News (and others) ran a story about how doctors in Sweden discovered an increase in heart attacks every year when the clocks spring forward and similarly a decrease in heart attacks when the clocks fall back. What’s surprising about ABC’s coverage is that the graphics they ran with the story were completely... »
5 Stories: Breast Cancer Screening
Late last year the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released a report that significantly changed the breast cancer screening guidelines for women. They raised the age where mammograms are recommended from 40 to 50. This set off a firestorm in the country and perhaps rightly so as a significant number of cancers are found... »
5 Stories Made Better By Visualization
I recently attended the CAR2010 conference and at one panel posed the following question: Why isn’t there more, much more, data graphics in the news? By way of example I listed 5 recent news stories that could have been significantly improved if the right data graphic accompanied the story. The goal was to get a sense... »
Abusing Reconciliation?
Datagraphics can be used to inject civility into public debates. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (and others) has been quoted as saying that reconciliation has never been used to pass something like health care before. And people who are pre-disposed to believe what the right says believe him without checking further. And people pre-disposed... »
Reviewing an NYTimes Infographic
Recently the New York Times ran an infographic on the proposed 2011 Federal Budget. It’s a nearly perfect use of the treemap capability in data visualization where the size of the boxes is proportional to the amount of spending. If you click on a region it zooms in revealing a bit more information than... »
Not All Spending Is Stimulus
President Obama announced a 3 year freeze on the discretionary part of the federal budget. Many liberal economists (including Paul Krugman) decried this as a wrong step. In an economic downturn the government should be spending and not cutting back. I agree in theory, but the question is does the theory apply in this... »
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