Visualization series: Insight from Cleveland and Tufte on plotting numeric data by groups

Wonderful post about visualisation and The Problem with Pie Charts (I found a 3D pie chart in a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment this morning). Visualization series: Insight from Cleveland and Tufte on plotting numeric data by groups.

Amazing video- Inventing on principle

I’ve just seen an amazing video, Brett Victor talking about Inventing on Principle. It should be of great interest to programmers and creatives and indeed anyone who needs or wants to come up with new and exciting ideas (everyone, in other words). If you’re not a programmer, stick with the video because he broadens out the discussion a lot a third of the way in. And if you are, just get stuck in and watch.

Stupidest pie chart of the year 2011

I’ve just been looking at the Stupidest bar chart of the year 2011 and I’ve been inspired to submit my Stupidest pie chart of the year 2011. I won’t say from where I obtained it and I’ve drawn the data myself to save from annoying the original authors. And here it is (click to enlarge): It represents the amount of maternity and paternity leave available in different countries. Pie charts are often not a very good idea, but in this case they are the worst possible idea.

New Year’s resolutions

It’s that time of year again, so what do I need to keep doing or do differently this year? 1. Keep being organised with Evernote and Getting Things Done. I found recently that I was processing so many bits of paper and information that I just gave up. Only the most important stuff got stored in my brain, the rest was discarded. Having started using Evernote and guided by Getting Things Done I have a massive brain pack to store everything I can’t use at the moment.

Complex surveys in R

I carried out what I thought was going to be a very simple piece of work the other day, slicing up some of the questions from a publicly available dataset in order to compare Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust with some other sites based on particular features of interest. I will post that work some other time, for now for those who are interested the source code is here. In the meantime, I thought I would share my experience with the book which helped me through this work, which is here.

Quick presentations

Just a quick one from me today, lots of deadlines colliding, which is handy because that’s what this post is about. I’ve been experimenting with the beamer class for LaTeX, with Sweave, which is another way of saying that I’ve been trying to save time producing slides for presentations directly from code as analysed by R. The syntax is very simple, open a document with: documentclass{beamer} usetheme{Berlin} title{Title goes here}

Simulating data

I try to publish as much of my work as I can on the internet, where the people who own the data agree (my little bit of the website is here) but very often I can’t publish the data because of issues with ongoing projects, other publications, various levels of confidentiality of data, and so on. So I’ve decided to try to simulate the data whenever there is an issue with publication.

Robin Hood marathon results

I ran the Robin Hood marathon yesterday in a decent-ish 4 hours and 13 minutes, which is my best yet. Naturally, I was curious to see how my fellow runners fared, and so I have scraped the times from a pdf and summarised them using R and ggplot2. I ran to support the Disaster Emergency Committee, because of the East Africa Appeal, so if you would like to support this very worthy cause then please go here.

Misleading means and medians

Over at this excellent blog there is an interesting discussion about times when means and medians can be deceptive, particularly in the case where two variables with equal means have very different distributions. I chimed in myself and mentioned some of the examples which I come across in my work. Here is a particularly egregious example, measurement of self-esteem in patients on psychiatric wards in England and Belgium- England mean

useR day four and beginner’s odfWeave

I’m a bit late with the report from the last day of the useR conference, I was very busy Thursday getting home and catching up with the housework on Friday. I once again favoured sessions about graphics and best in show must go to Easy interactive ggplots, particularly for a bit of a coding novice like myself. I’m going to take some of the ideas from this talk and use them at work, it will blow everyone’s mind (well, doing it for free with blow everyone’s mind, anyway) so a big thank you to Richie for sharing his ideas and his code.