“Streetlights and Shadows”
Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners. See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on [...]
Rolling heads can’t think
Wolf Blitzer calls for heads to roll after the Christmas Day attack. But Jill Dychè is a data pro, and she’d rather let the heads think. “Who should get fired?” is the same conversation as after screwups in corporations, writes Dychè, principal at Baseline Consulting. Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the [...]
Choices are never the same twice
George Packer wrote in the New Yorker (quoted in Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire) on the books that Obama and his generals are reading. He wrote this about making public policy, about the difficulty of basing decisions on the past. Making policy is about making choices, and they are never the same twice. Over the past [...]
A long look at Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”
Stephen Few gave a snappy name to his new book, Now You See It, and a cover that signals a gem — all black with a slice of sunset that highlights the “see.” The question, though, is who the “you” is.
As if there there can be a single version of the truth
The popular New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman often disagrees with his fellow economists. Let’s all raise our eyebrows in shock. Not! My shock is at the idea among some of his readers that there’s a right and wrong answer. Today, for example, Krugman again refers to his opinion that the stimulus [...]
Some of us like to name things in BI
Stephen Few’s damning review of a new BI tool prompted a weeks-long discussion-turned-scholarly-fistfight over definitions.
Scary stories of information management today on DM Radio
DM Radio editor Eric Kavanagh puts on a scary mask for a special Halloween show this afternoon: “Scary Stories of Information Management.” Scaring you will be quite a trick after a year of cadaveric prose in BI articles and blogs. But there’s probably more where that came from. He wants your stories of fright and [...]
Why they resist open source
In defense of the lively, Mark Madsen observes the nature of resistance to open source BI tools. An excerpt: Overcoming someone’s resistance to open source in your organization means that you probably need to educate them, given that they use open source every day without thinking about it. It’s in everything from cars to cell [...]
Off the charts: “black swan” ahead?
“Black swans” are the anti-gravity of predictive analytics. These events are so far off the charts that we dismiss the possibility out of hand. But when one occurs, it’s a doozy. The Panic of ’08 may lead us straight into one of these, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by [...]
Wall Street Journal tag clouds compare Romney and JFK
Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president. It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados). No big story has [...]
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