AT&T has recently announced it will no longer offer unlimited data plans for new iPhone users in the US, and now some carriers in the UK have followed suit. In each case, the providers claim that only a very small number of users actually use enough data to warrant ... [Read more...]

Below is a walk-through of some of the basics of customizing plot in R. These are all based on the graphics package that comes in the base installation of R. Let’s start by making a basic plot in R. In the code snippets below, green text behind a... [Read more...]

If you're being particularly cost-conscious about your use of printer ink or toner, you may be wondering which font you should choose to minimize ink use. Here's an infographic with the answer: This is an interesting infographic in its own right, but what makes it cool is that these are ... [Read more...]

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Tomislav Hengl of the University of Amsterdam has published new book, A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping. It's jam-packed with 291 pages on mapping and analyzing spatial data using free software including R, SAGA, GRASS, ILWIS and Google Earth, and freely-available map data. The book itself is also available for free, ... [Read more...]

Adam Bonica, a grad student in political science at NYU, recently published a ranking of the political slant of various professions, based on the amount and recipient (Republican or Democratic) of political donations by lawyers, lobbyists, physicians and many other occupations. This paper (PDF) gives the complete analysis, but the ... [Read more...]

Smoothing is a statistical technique that helps you to spot trends in noisy data, and especially to compare trends between two or more fluctuating time series. It's a useful visualization tool that I'm pleased to see cropping up more and more in statistical graphics on the Web -- it's now ... [Read more...]

otivated by the excellent R package pgfSweave, I begin to notice the font families in my graphs when writing Sweave documents. The default font family for PDF graphs is Helvetica, which is, in most cases (I think), inconsistent with the LaTeX font styles. Some common font families are listed in ?... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham (the creator of the popular ggplot2 graphics package for R) has posted video of a 2-hour short course on Visualisation in R at his blip.tv channel. The video is split into four thirty-minute segments: Basic Graphics Displaying Large Data Data manipulation and transformations Polishing your plots for ... [Read more...]

Want to get a quick sense of who are the most active committers to your SVN project? Using just a few lines of R code and the SVN log file, reader and new R user Rhys Kidd created this chart to review commits to the Freespace 2 Source Code Project: Rhys ... [Read more...]

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Download "Getting Started with the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit" (pdf, 1.25 megabytes) Download the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit How The Chart Was Made Whenever a Twitter user posts a tweet, an object is created and entered into t... [Read more...]

Edward Tufte has been a tireless promoter of good infographics, and he's even taken some controversial steps to rid the world of chartjunk. But now he's gone too far: Then again, this chart from the Wall Street Journal could lead anyone to felinicide: What's wrong with a simple bar chart, ... [Read more...]

One of my favourite shows on TV right now is The Big Bang Theory. For those who haven't seen it: it's like Friends, except instead of New York yuppies, it's PhD physicists and engineers at CalTech. It's nice to see geeks and smart people be the focus (rather than the ... [Read more...]

Cluster Analysis is a useful technique for classifying the members of a group (people, events, measurements, etc) into "similar" groups. How "similar" is defined depends on the application, but generally involves looking at a number of attributes of the group. For example, we could cluster people by looking at their ... [Read more...]

Edward Tufte, a pioneer of effective data visualization (and a personal hero) has just been appointed by the White House to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds. Tufte explains: I'm ... [Read more...]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a page with some interesting information about last week's earthquake in Chile, but what really stood out for me was this chart of the predicted wave heights around the globe resulting from the associated tsunami: Click to enlarge: it's a fascinating chart. ... [Read more...]

A few months back I gave a presentation to the NYC R Meetup. (R is a statistical programming language. If this means nothing to you, feel free to stop reading now.) The presentation was on ggplot2, a popular package for generating graphs of data and statistics. In the talk (which ... [Read more...]

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The Official Google Blog today includes an analysis of Google's search traffic related to the recently-concluded Winter Olympics, correlating various high-profile events with searches from particular countries. For example, traffic from the United States shows the expected diurnal cycle but with promintent peaks for the opening ceremony and the hockey ... [Read more...]