Topical
Thorstein Veblen and Hard Coding
It is still quite common to hear the career progression of an analyst described as one upwards from the hard graft of coding and “getting your hands dirty” towards the enviable heights of people management and strategic thinking. Whenever I hear this it reminds me of the book Conspicuous Consumption by the American economist Thorstein … Continue reading
Clegg vs Pleb: An XKCD-esque chart
I saw an interesting “challenge” on StackOverflow last night to create an XKCD style chart in R. A couple of hours later & going in a very similar direction to a couple of the answers on SO, I got to something that looked pretty good, using the sin and cos curves for simple and reproducible … Continue reading
Why are pirates called pirates?
In homage to International Talk Like a Pirate Day… I recently stumbled across a series of blog posts from the folks at IDV that visualised the archive of recorded pirate attacks which has been collected by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It’s a dataset of 6000+ pirate attacks which have been recorded over the last 30 … Continue reading
The changing face of “Analysis”
Here’s something I started to write a few months ago, but never got around to finish it off. Neil Charles over at Wallpapering Fog has just written an excellent post about the growing importance of R and Tableau to the modern day analyst. Although not as old in the tooth as Neil (sorry Neil), even … Continue reading
Voter Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) seems to be coming into the mainstream, with the New York Times recently reporting how Target has used such analytics to identify expectant mothers based on their shopping habits and was then able to target them appropriately with special offers and vouchers. As the 2012 US Election approaches, it seems that … Continue reading
#sherlock & the power of the retweet
Much has been made over the last few days of Sherlock writer Steven Moffat‘s views on people who tweet whilst watching TV. Whilst watching it last night, I kept an eye on the tweets during the show and there was clearly a lot of volume going through the Twitter-sphere. Interested to find out a bit more … Continue reading
Posts we like
- What Facebook Knows - Technology Review
- Use Decision-Driven Visualization to Activate (Big) Data by Lee Feinberg - BeyeNETWORK
- Wallpapering Fog: It's never been about the data
- Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald's Entire Menu, Survives - Technology Review
- Obama Campaign’s Vast Effort to Re-Enlist ’08 Supporters - NYTimes.com
