Category: Uncategorized
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Financial Times: Visual Vocabulary Iterations
A while back I found a pdf version of the Financial Times Visual Vocabulary — an explanatory guide to when and why to choose various chart types for communication. It inspired me to started my own version of the Visual Vocabulary as an exercise in creating all sorts of different charts on Tableau Public over…
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Calling Bullshit
University of Washington published the syllabus and recorded lectures from their public course a few years ago. As I’ve been working on learning some of the basics of Machine Learning in R I’ve been thinking about this UofW course a lot. The first step is to define BS so we can identify it and call…
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Boot discs: Import pandas as pd
My first computer was a Mac SE 30 which required two different boot discs to be swapped in and out while it was loading up. We had an external disc drive so you could walk away and let it alternate between the two discs. Every time I have to import multiple libraries before starting to…
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“no more backbone than a chocolate éclair”
Roosevelt, Pareto, Kaldor-Hicks & Sales Negotiation Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Teddy Roosevelt once referred to President William Mckinley as not-spineless, but having “no more back bone than a chocolate eclair”. I was reminded of this quote I first ran across in a high school history class when I re-read Holden Advisor’s book “Negotiating with Backbone: Eight Strategies to Defend…
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Iron Viz & Hourly Rates
The Tableau Iron Viz competition has me thinking about how consulting hourly rates suffer from one of the major flaws of other cost plus pricing schemes — they automatically pass along productivity gains to the buyer. Iron Viz is a competition where designers are all given the same structured and cleaned dataset with an analytics prompt and…
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Prep work IS the work
Why do we act like prep work is unique to data science? Across the street from daycare this morning was a guy sanding the side of a garage, presumably prior to repainting it and there were construction crews replacing water mains tearing up the street. My friend Mark likes to joke that they shouldn’t call…
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Quit: Book Review
Annie Duke recently published a book on what she calls quit/grit trade-off decisions. She incorporates a lot of references to behavioral economics studies, human stories to illustrate concepts and quotes of song lyrics and aphorisms which help drive her points home. Overall I really enjoyed listening to this book and I felt that it will…
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Dev / Test / Prod
I’m starting to understand the ETL – ELT revolution. Test is never an exact copy of Prod, even when its structurally the same. Sometimes it has less memory, almost always it has less data and its probably not visible to the same users. Like a parent who buys extra back up sets of their child’s…
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“But these go to 11…”
This scene in Spinal Tap captures something fundamental about data scales and labeling, but what is it? The buyer wants to know if the amp with knobs scaled from 0-11 is louder than those with settings from 0-10. I’m not sure if the more important message is:1) In the face of numeric data people still…
Carragee Consulting 