This morning’s Links Dump included a post from Mad Mike and an entire blog on improving academic posters. For those not in the sciences, one of the traditional means of communicating research results is at a poster session where tens to hundreds of researcher each prepare a poster (usually 3’x5′ or thereabouts) about their project, […]
Category: Data Presentation
“Line Plot” is Never the Right Choice (Why Excel Sucks, aleph-nought in a series)
There have been a bunch of interesting things written about education recently that I’ve been too busy teaching to comment on. I was pulling them together this morning to do a sort of themed links dump, when the plot at the right, from Kevin Drum’s post about school testing jumped out at me. This shows […]
Bad and Good Presentation Graphs
I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students’ first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same […]
Scientific Salary Stratigraphy: Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results
Inside Higher Ed has a news squib about gender disparities in academic science, which points to a Nature story about a survey on job satisfaction (bad IHE, giving a false impression on the story!). The gender portion of the story is limited to a short section at the end of the article, and one graph: […]
Playing With Graphs: People in Albany Don’t Own Kindles
A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways. So, what do we learn from this? […]
The Visual Misrepresentation of Quantitative Information: Wages and Debt
Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a Thing about bad graphs used in the media and on blogs. When people use stupid presentation tricks to exaggerate features of data to make their argument look stronger, it bugs me. But what really irks me is when people use stupid presentation tricks to […]