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The economisting of art

Here is brief excerpt from a draft chapter for Beautiful Evidence. The complete chapter is posted in the thread on "Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations" in the New Answers threads.  image1

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Mathematical notation and typography

It is possible to use Bembo for mathematical typesetting with careful work by a colleague. An excerpt from Beautiful Evidence:

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Mapped pictures: image annotation

Diagramatic pictures allow more focused, tighter commentary on pictures, compared to text or captions outside the picture frame. I've long been concerned at how the format of this board seems to enforce a separation of text and image. I'll be trying out more mapped pictures here and would appreciate good examples of mapped pictures (for thinking about the issue in Beautiful Evidence).

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Instead of a mapped picture with direct labels, here's an impediment visual-verbal encoding:

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                     A' = Anna                                                    Z = Zerlina                      A'' = Alex                           A''' = Abby



Yale alumni questionnaire inquires about income, wealth

The Association of Yale Alumni recently asked graduates of Yale to update their entries in the alumni directory. The questionnaire also had optional items about income and wealth, information which "will not appear in the directory," possibly to the regret of our more competitive graduates. Theoretically requiring information from a few alumni accurate to 8 significant digits, the categories offered are not modest:  image1

Links, Causal Arrows, Networks

Here are some ideas on linking lines and causal arrows from a draft of some material from my Beautiful Evidence. The chapter suggests methods for showing linking lines and causal arrows, and also demonstrates ideas for assessing the credibility of various links. That is, the links themselves are taken as explanatory evidence. Note the typographic design of the organization chart which replaces the conventional design of bureaucrats-in-boxes. Four previous threads have discussed technical details of a few parts of the chapter:   Barr Art Chart    Feynman Diagrams Cladograms    Lombardi I'd be grateful for helpful comments.  image1  image2 =  image8  image9  image10  image11  image12  image13  image14

Millstone sculpture series

12 feet high, mild steel, 11,000 pounds, a series, Millstone 1-6. Fredrick K. Orkin image9 Fredrick K. Orkin image10  image1  image2  image3  image4  image5  image6  image7  image8

Spring Arcs, an ET landscape sculpture

Sparkline theory and practice Edward Tufte

A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution. Sparklines mean that graphics are no longer cartoonish special occasions with captions and boxes, but rather sparkline graphics can be everywhere a word or number can be: embedded in a sentence, table, headline, map, spreadsheet, graphic. Data graphics should have the resolution of typography. See Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, 46-63. Sparklines: recent finds NES Sparklines Michael Fogleman (January 23, 2018)  image6 Pulsars and Sparkline-like graphics. Nature (vol. 217, February 24, 1968)  image2  image3 Sparkline small multiple  image4 1970 NASA report of throttle problems in the Apollo Lunar Module.  image1 Sparklines in Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne, 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design (Lawrence King Publishing, 2012), p. 196: The Fine Print, p. 196 Apple Watch sparkline, announced September 9, good but should show more detail, more data texture. Should have design minimization, not data minimization. Apple watch sparklines Tutorial here for creating SVG-based sparklines with d3.js. sparklines in d3 Implementing angular.js directives for d3.js and nvd3.js, tutorial here. sparklines with angular.js Below, sparklines in Twitter analytics, good but routinely longer time periods and more intense detail would be better. General idea = max[data], min[design]. Twitter analytics sparklines Diluting Perceptual Cluster/Streak Bias: Informal, Inline, Interocular Trauma Tests When people look at random number tables, they sees all kinds of clusters and streaks (even in random data). Similarly, when people are asked generate a random series of bits, they generate too few long streaks (such as 6 identical bits a row), because their model of what is random greatly underestimates the amount of streakiness in genuinely random data. Sports, financial, and political reports are notorious for their narrative overreach, fantasizing about clusters, streaks, momentum, turning points, trend-spotting. The shorter the attention span of the reporter and the audience, the greater the faux trend spotting. xkcd did this wonderful critique: All sports commentary: A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers. Let's use them to build narratives! A General Manager of a professional NBA basketball team described to me this strategy for escaping over-storytelling in postgame analysis. When coaches watched the video of a game, they would often simply reinforce their prior story: "When we kicked the ball out of bounds twice in the first minute, that was the beginning of the end, we lost all momentum and never caught up...blah blah." To overcome premature storytelling, the team did postgame reviews with the plays of the game in random order. This initially was intellectually taxing to viewers with preconceived narratives. In economics, autocorrelation is regarded as a plague. In sports, it is the main explanatory variable. To dilute streak-guessing, randomize on time over the same data, and compare random streaks with the observed data. Below, the top sparkline shows the season's win-loss sequence (the little horizontal line = home games, no line = road games). Weighting by overall record of wins/losses and home/road effects yields ten random sparklines. Hard to see the difference between real and random. The 10 random sparkline sequences can be regenerated again and again by, oddly enough, clicking on "Regenerate random seasons." This is looking a bit like bootstrap calculation. For the real and amazing bootstrap, applied to data graphics and contour lines, see Persi Diaconis and Bradley Efron, "Computer Intensive Methods in Statistics." The test of the 10 randomized sparklines vs. the actual data is an "Interocular Trauma Test" because the comparison hits the analyst right between the eyes. This little randomization check-up, which can be repeated again and again, is seen by the analyst at the very moment of making inferences based on a statistical graphic of observed data. (Thanks to Adam Schwartz for his excellent work on randomized sparklines. ET)

NASA seeks to curb "PowerPoint engineering"

Glacial erratics: landscape found art (and origins of cubism)

Helping to build a road today, I threw a rock (about 0.4 cubic feet in volume) into the road bed. The end of the rock shattered and revealed the ultimate source of Cubism. "Fractured planes" is a good short description of Cubism. Today's fractured rock is on the left; Braque's Rio Tinto Factories at L'Estaque, 1910, at right.  image1  image2  image3  image4