"It's all about the content. Get better content or use sparklines". Edward Tufte

Yesterday I went to Edward Tufte's one-day course on data visualization: Presenting data and information (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses).

I am sharing below some rough take home notes I took:

• New methods of presenting will be sans PowerPoint. Provide readings, discuss, and explain with visuals as you go along.
• Get better content
• Use sparklines. Sparklines are datawords: data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics. They have applications for financial and economic data by tracking changes over time. Sparklines also reduce recency bias and may aid in better decision making (it was one of the first times I hear about a bias termed "recency"). You can easily create sparklines using excel, the sparkline feature was added in Microsoft excel 2010. I created my sparkline satisfaction rate with Tufte's style and lecture over the course of the day (Figure).

  

  Data points varied over the course of the day. The First data point was 8.89 at 10:15 am and my last data point was 9.99 at 16:15 pm. The lowest point is highlighted in red because the course stopped and I had to go find food. The highest point is highlighted in green because the course ended 2 minutes early and satisfaction was high given the feeling of wanting more. Galileo and Euclid were also mentioned which also contributed to a higher satisfaction, given my fascination in both. Note that this is just an example to illustrate a sparkline, satisfaction is subjective. Also Tufte strongly encouraged links to raw data so I am pasting the original table at the end.
  
  
  
  

Datapede leisure time

These past two weeks were spent with family and friends. During this leisure time, the first Datapede tote bag was developed at T-Gallery, a custom T-shirt store in Greenwich village in New York. I recommend it if you are ever interested in designing t-shirts and/or tote bags.

On another note, I will be attending a one day course tomorrow with Edward Tufte on the visual display of quantitative information  (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses).  Edward Tufte is a statistician and professor emeritus of statistics, political science, and computer science at Yale. He is a pioneer in data visualization. I will be sharing take home notes from the course. Additionally, upcoming posts on Datapede will be about:

P-value: A double-edged sword?
More of the confidence interval

I have also gotten some requests to discuss more epidemiological principles. I will weave those in future posts.