October 2009
1 post
Video: CNN Leaves It There | The Daily Show |... →
The Daily Show (yeah, yeah, a comedy show) does a great job explaining why we built Verifiable.com This is 10+ minutes of brilliant humor that makes me want to tear my (non-existent) hair out. ”CNN has 20 to 35 to 70% more facts than the other networks.”
— Jason
September 2009
2 posts
Modifying context menus with Flash Player 10 while...
(This is a post on coding. It has little to do with charting, but we ran into this problem and thought someone else might too)
In our app, we like to modify the context menu (what you get when you right-click) to have context-useful items. Not exactly groundbreaking. This has worked great for months. But recently, we received a bug report from a Windows XP user. It seems that the most recent...
Verifiable Pro: Private Content, Chart/Data...
We’re proud to announce the release of our Verifiable Pro product today, allowing you to upload, visualize, and share private data with only those you wish. We tried hard to get the details right. Namely:
You can specify whether all new content should be private by default, so you’ll never accidentally publish something you didn’t mean to.
You can share private charts two...
August 2009
3 posts
In response to Foreign Policy: don't look at...
Foreign Policy published an article, “Think Again: African’s Crisis”, in which Charles Kenny writes, “Africa has seen child mortality fall from 26.5 to 15 percent since 1960 and life expectancy increase by 10 years.”
Although this is true, it’s deeply misleading to look at Africa in isolation. In fact, compared to the rest of the world, Africa lags...
Visualizations We're Watching
Robert Kosara just released a new version of his Parallel Sets visualization app, a focused proof of concept of one visualization type (most popularly seen here with Titanic mortality data). Anything he does is worth paying attention to, and this is no exception.
After talking with him at last month’s OECD conference, I know he’s eager to move beyond “the same old chart types...
July 2009
3 posts
auto-updated data feeds + data joining +...
Jason Y. whipped up a fascinating chart this afternoon that shows off the power of our new data feeds when combined with joined data and calculated variables.
He started with a data set of the monthly closing price of the S&P 500 Index. Then he joined that with another monthly data set of the 10-year Treasury yield. Then he created two new calculated variable series representing the monthly...
New auto-update capability for data on Verifiable!
Starting today, a number of our public data sets will be automatically updated from the source, as new data is published. Examples include the rich unemployment data sets from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Price Index data. We’ll be adding more all the time, each one tagged with “auto-updated” for easy search. If you want time series data that we...
New Feature: Custom Colors
One of our most requested features has been the ability to assign custom colors to chart variables.
Although our default color palate has been carefully chosen to allow the maximum number of distinct variables (a future blog post in and of itself), our assignments won’t always correspond to the specific colors naturally associated with certain data, or may not match your personal or...
May 2009
1 post
3 tags
"IT MAKES SENSE TO BUY GOLD !"
Something as simple as visualizing the value of gold over the past two centuries highlights two important and frequently overlooked problems when charting price data.
Here’s a typical historical price chart, from an informational website advocating gold as an investment:
The first problem with this chart is inflation. Changes in a commodity’s price do not necessarily correspond to...
April 2009
5 posts
Elsewhere on tumblr.... 20 years of Haitian... →
Tax Freedom Day
We’ve posted a new featured chart this morning, showing the power of data set joins on Verifiable.com. After one of our users uploaded a great data set listing Tax Freedom Day for each state, I wondered what the implications of low taxes were for a state’s population. I searched for other data sets to join it with (by state), and in just a few minutes came up with this.
The Tax...
What's the best way to tell this story?
Over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, there is a discussion of this chart:
There has been some criticisms of it, and I posted the following reply. I encourage you to check out the whole discussion. My reply:
As the author of the chart in question, it’s neat to read this discussion and criticism. (Someone cares!)
I chose a stacked bar chart after...
Public Launch Of Verifiable.com!
Hi Everyone, First, thanks for all your support through our public beta. We really appreciate everyone’s great suggestions. If we haven’t acted on them yet, then feel secure in knowing that they are on The List. On that note, check out our great new mechanism for voting on which changes you want next. Today’s release is the first step in what we hope will be an amazing tool.
...
What a long strange trip it's been (part deux)
Hi Everyone, The last time I blogged about what a long strange trip it’s been was July 23, 2008, when we launched the public beta. We have been working like crazy, not just on bugs and features, but on the whole production environment. You may have read our blog entry: Public launch of Verifiable.com! And wondered what is this thing you call Verifiable? :-)
Since everyone is pushing for...
February 2009
3 posts
Playing With Numbers, Health Care Edition.
In the United States, a shocking number of people have no health insurance and poor access to health care. Many go bankrupt because of medical bills. We desperately need reform. What we don’t need, however, is bad charts.
For example:
There are some major problems with this chart.
It’s got two different units superimposed. On the left hand side, there is the number of...
Disk Permissions Database Read Failure in OS X...
This blog entry is not for the feint of heart. You need to be the type of person who feels comfortable in Terminal and knows what rsync is. I DON’T REP and WARRANT that this will work on your machine. For all I know it might make things worse. I am ONLY reporting what worked on MY MACHINE. Having said that, I wish this blog entry had been around for me, it would have saved me a couple...
1 tag
Don't forget your squares.
recovery.gov launched today.
Its mission is to provide transparency into how the US government is spending the money from the stimulus act that President Obama signed on February 17, 2009.
They have a chart showing the big buckets of where the money is going:
(as of now, you can see it here)
The “Other” dot represents $8 billion. The area of it should therefore be 1/36...
August 2008
1 post
You're supposed to update these blog things...
Although our site is now public, there are a number of features we want to add
in the coming weeks and months. Our aim is to produce a website that will
make it easier for you to analyze, display, present and share your information. Over time, we plan to add a number of tools to guide you in exploring your data.
Just to give you a sense of where we are headed, these are our rough development...
July 2008
2 posts
Going Public Beta Today
Hi Everyone,
Visible Certainty is going public beta today. This has been a long trip and might be worth visiting the history of how we got here.
First Jason and I spent from 1998 to 2006 trying to get to a Tufte conference. We were fascinated by the premise of a better way to communicate data, but we were also pretty busy. The first time we talked about it we were busy working on the...
Space Shuttle Challenger
Is it the data, the tool, or the editorial choices that are made in analyzing the data that cause good people to make bad decisions based on poor data visualizations?
For instance, on the morning of Jan 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. The disintegration of the shuttle was caused by the failure of an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster. ...
March 2008
1 post
3 tags
Analysis is Iterative
Cleveland makes the point that analysis (problem solving) is iterative. This should include different data input choices. We are toying with the idea of just throwing up a bunch of visualizations to get you started. You point us at the data and we will make some basic assumptions and show you the information several different ways. Maybe one of these visualizations will spark your creative...
February 2008
1 post
1 tag
Verifiable.com Reading List
”Show Me the Numbers” by Few
“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”by Tufte
“Beautiful Evidence” by Tufte
“The Elements of Graphing Data” by Cleveland
“Visualizing Data” by Cleveland
“The Grammar of Graphics” by Wilkinson
“Turning Numbers into Knowledge” by Koomey
“What The Numbers...
December 2007
2 posts
3 tags
From the awful to the sublime
The New York Times has been breaking a lot of ground with innovative graphics. One of their graphic designers, Matthew Ericson, recently gave a talk on their approach. This Sunday’s paper had examples of great and awful charts.
First, the awful. In an article on global warming, this appears:
It’s a little hard to see what’s going on there. That’s the problem. ...
First.
This is our inaugural blog post. We want to use this blog to cover three main areas:
Thoughts on creating and giving great presentations
Providing some transparency about our development process and progress
Code recipes that may be of use to others. We’re using “Ruby on Rails”:http://rubyonrails.com/ for our website, and we’ve relied on many other blogs posts...