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... »
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... »
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... »
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... »
BloomEnergy has been running the media circuit recently with their announcement of a hydrocarbon based fuel cell for electrical power generation. They were on 60 minutes this past weekend, Good Morning America this morning and will probably be on 20/20 later this week. The hype surrounding the box is huge and almost buried in... »
Every now and then we run across an article that appears off-topic but upon inspection showcases perfectly what we’re trying to do here. Recently the free dating website OkCupid.com ran an article analyzing the pictures people used on their dating profiles and how effective those pictures were at making contact with the opposite sex.... »
