Some behind-the-scenes comments on my recent article on New York's restaurant inspection grades; it appeared on FiveThirtyEight this Tuesday. *** The Nature of Ratings This article is about the ratings of things. I devoted a considerable amount of pages to this topic in Numbersense (link) - Chapter 1 is all about the US News ranking of schools. A few key points are: All rating schemes are completely subjective. There is…
Via Dean Eckles on Twitter. We have this from Vox: Have a great Labor Day! And thanks for keeping this blog alive.
An anonymous reader sent in a Type V critique of the following map of July unemployment rates by state. The map was published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and used in a recent article in Vox. Matt @...
Tom Davenport is one of the leading voices on business analytics, and he has a new piece titled "Why are most 'targeted' marketing offers so bad?" in which he expanded on a question I raised in my HBR article. Tom's book Competing on Analytics is a classic. He has a great appreciation for the business of the data business. In the new feature, Davenport classifies marketing offers he gets into…
Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, cited the following chart from a World Bank project: His comment was: "We can see that while China has overtaken Germany and Japan to become the world's second-largest economy (i.e., total area of the rectangle)...
Vox published this chart: This sort of chart is, unfortunately, quite common in business circles. Just about the only thing one can read readily from this chart is the overall growth in the plug-in vehicle market (the heights of the...
Note to New York metro readers: I'm an invited speaker at NYU's "Art and Science of Brand Storytelling" summer course which starts tomorrow. I will be speaking on Thursday, 12-1 pm. You can still register here. *** The home run...
Facebook data scientists are being blasted for a social psychology experiment they ran in 2012 in which they varied the amount of positive/negative content exposed to users in newsfeeds and measured whether this affected the positive/negative content posted by those users. (link to WSJ report; link to paper) I'm perplexed by the reaction. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow calls it "likely illegal", who links to James Grimmelmann, a law professor. Slate…
Bernard L. tipped us about this "infographic": The chart is missing a title. The arcs present "sleep schedules" for the named people. The "data" comes from a book. I wonder about the accuracy of such data. Also note the inherent...
This is part 3 of my response to Gelman's post about the DST/heart attacks study. The previous parts are here and here. One of the keys of vetting any Big Data/OCCAM study is taking note of the decisions made by the researchers in conducting the analysis. Most of these decisions involve subjective adjustments or unverifiable assumptions. Not that either of those things are inherently bad - indeed, any analysis one…
