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Dan Murray

Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data

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How do you approach unfamiliar data? An investment banker I talked to last week — one I know from a client’s whitepaper — rejects the “don’t think” method, advocated in my earlier post about Dan Murray. Instead, he thinks first, on paper.

“My approach is driven by having a bunch of gray hair,” says Michael Princi, managing director of ThoughtStorm Strategic Capital, a boutique investment bank and advisory firm in northern New Jersey. “I want to use my business acumen to tease out what might be the underlying issues.”

Experience counts The naive mind is prone to bad mistakes, he says.… Read the rest “Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data”

How to analyze unfamiliar data: circle, dive, and riff

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When you come face to face with unfamiliar data, how do you proceed? How do you avoid sending yourself and your shiny “speed of thought” tool slamming into a dead end? Dan Murray’s got a routine — and he’s also got certain music and right-brained books to go along.

Dan’s first rule: “Don’t pre-think.” It’s the hardest thing for people to learn, he says. “If you go into [data analysis] thinking you know where you’re going, you easily miss the granule of gold.”

He’s the chief operating officer and heavy-hitting data analyst at InterWorks, Inc., an Oklahoma-based business consultancy. What seems to me like an unending stream of mid-size businesses from all different industries has kept him running days, nights, and weekends to make sense of each one’s data and unravel old data knots.… Read the rest “How to analyze unfamiliar data: circle, dive, and riff”

Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses

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I’m sorry to tell you serious types out there, but visual analysis is often a game — in fact, one of the best games in town with Tableau Software’s visual analysis tool. Now Tableau Public is going to bring it to the masses.

In the same way that YouTube spawned a surge of new filmmakers, Tableau Public — free, running the same engine as its desktop sibling, and embedable — will bring on a new generation of data players and spectators.

I was a spectator at a data visualization conference one afternoon two years ago. Tableau Software director of visual analysis Jock Mackinlay had finished his presentation and another person had started his.… Read the rest “Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses”