Reality TV Bites

It's winter in Vancouver, which means it's the grey season.  This is the time of year that I watch more tv than is healthy and unfortunately, this is the time of year that tv is focused on the reality of badly behaving humans or awards shows.  When I watch tv, I want some fiction, some laughs, some fantasy.  When I want reality, I go outside and hang with humans who fortunately act nothing like those on reality tv.

For inspirational reality (other than family and friends of course), I tend to go to TED or YouTube.  Here's a bunch of great talks I've seen in the past few months that have inspired me or given me hope for humanity.

Richard Thaler's lecture at U California on government regulation, the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill and nudging.

Thaler is a behavioural economist and the co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, with Cass Sunstein. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my wish-list and having seen this brilliant video it may push Geekenomics down the list.






How to help people kick-ass with open data - Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Citizens (14 minutes).

Kathy proposes that it's just as important to create a killer user as it is to create a killer product; to build the things that inspire people to develop their passions.

Journalism in the Age of Data:  a video report on data visualization as the storytelling medium.

This is an 8 part video report (approx 1 hour) on how journalists are infusing their stories with sophisticated on-line, interactive analytics and the tools they're using.

Amanda Cox has produced some of my favorite viz's over the years, so I was particularly happy to see her interviewed here. Also, Tableau is mentioned.

This was a great talk by David McCandless, illustrating some terrific ideas for visualizations and dashboards in health care.

Wouldn't it be nice to go on-line and see your test results presented visually with the appropriate thresholds identified?






Hopefully these individuals are inspiring CEO's, directors and managers to ask more from their reporting analysts with questions like:

Why can't you make this report tell me a story like [X] did in the New York Times?

or

There's a great api on my phone that dashboards my stock portfolio, why can't our reports be that clear?

Canadian Political Party Stats - January 2011

Just for fun, I spent a few hours today searching for Canadian News Media viz's using Tableau.  Other than Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun (who has done some fantastic visualizations over the years), I haven't found anything yet.

Then I came across this visual in the Globe and Mail presenting the current party standings in the latest poll (click for larger view).  My father was sitting close by reading the paper and we started discussing the potential of a spring election. When I showed him this visual he was baffled.  It took a while for both of us to identify the key points.  It killed the discussion that we normally would have had.


Now, this isn't a horrid visual (the layout is particularly effective), but a good visual shouldn't require that the user do another level of analysis in their head.  The visual should tell the story, just as a journalist would.  The pertinent facts should stand out. Simply presenting the votes in bar charts rather than donuts would have helped a great deal.

Because I'm a little type A, I entered the information in a spreadsheet and quickly uploaded it into Tableau Public. It took me longer to do the data entry than it did to produce this simple dashboard. I separated the regional charts into West and East (if you're a Canadian, you know that this is how we discuss this information) and didn't bother with assigning party colors because I was going to print it in black and white. Then my father and I had a conversation.

I can't help but think that the analyst who produced this would create stunning visualizations using Tableau, plus they would have the ability to provide interactivity.

Federal vote and seat projections as of Jan. 17, 2011

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Waiting for Waiting for Superman

76.9% of Canadian youth aged 18-19 have graduated from high school. (2009/10)

That's not great, but we do know that a lot of youth will attend some form of upgrading down the line. The high school dropout rate is defined as those aged 20-24 who have not graduated from high school and are not attending school. In Canada, the dropout rate is 8.5%. Now, that's disconcerting.

If you've seen The Lottery, then you know about the challenges currently facing the American education system and the consequences of the "No Child Left Behind" policies from the Bush era.  The recently released Waiting for Superman appears to expand on The Lottery, providing more examples of education reform currently in action and it would seem that we in Canada should take notice.  According to producer Lesley Chilcott:

"Use us as a warning sign here in Canada. My understanding is things are starting to slip here."