Month: May 2009

Match.com and the City You Live In- Equally Important to Finding a Date?

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After reading several articles, I decided to add my help for wayward singles seeking the right city to call home.   Following in the footsteps of work in the New York Times and Sperling’s BestPlaces, I seek to create a visually intuitive presentation about the “best” place to be single.   In particular, I seek to find the best cities based on concentration of singles and offer insights about cities with better odds for women and men- with some surprising results!

I hope this is a fun topic for everyone and a useful reference for some!

The presentation with maps: click here for presentation.

Best Medium-Sized Cities for Men

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Visual Analytics Best Practices—avoid flash, keep it simple!

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Why don’t you just show me the numbers?

  • Poor presentation of data can make informative interpretation difficult or even impossible.
  • We spend years diagramming sentences & solving equations but have minimal exposure to telling stories with data!
  • The ability to explore, understand and utilize real-world data is a rare skill that can dramatically improve your organization and career.

Sample revenue data from a university

College Quarter Total Revenue Tuition Research Plan Revenue
Arts 2009-01 $5,510,268 $5,230,198 $280,070 $6,000,000
Design 2009-01 $703,770 $408,762 $295,008 $680,000
Engineering 2009-01 $25,139,083 $6,201,932 $18,937,151 $26,800,000
Sciences 2009-01 $4,439,991 $2,159,010 $2,280,981 $4,400,000

 

A prickly example

While it is indeed looking sharp, this graph is uninformative.

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The Graphical Resume- New Concept and Possible Innovation

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I love exploring the possible intersections of technology and information, with the intent to improve or expedite knowledge sharing. One of my recent epiphanies was related to the difficulty of efficiently reviewing resumes, especially technical resumes. Recruiters and managers spend huge amounts of time reviewing resumes (at least they used too) and automated tools have … Read more

Data warehousing success- 100% Vision / 80% Tactical / 20% of the Work

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My Background in Data Warehousing

I have been involved in the creation, development, and maintenance of seven data warehouses through the years- one of them before I even knew about the term “data warehousing”!   I have built them with SAS and Oracle, SAS alone, Informatica and Oracle, Oracle alone, and SQL Server.

I have also visited many companies as an adviser, consultant and user of their data warehouse. In these many visits, I have seen some successes and many failures. Often, the failures could have been prevented with some key guiding principles.

Data Warehousing or Enterprise Data Integration?

Data warehousing is now known by a new buzz word, Enterprise Data Integration. In fact, SAS recently renamed SAS ETL Studio as SAS Data Integration Studio (they also added some new features around the EDI area, one new feature was around continual data acquisition so that near real time data feeds are available in the data warehouse.) Another great part of SAS EDI is SAS Data Quality, this should be a consideration throughout the entire process, but I won’t directly comment about data quality in this post. Since most people still use the term data warehousing, so I will keep the popular terminology over the analysts and even SAS.

What Does it Take to Build a Successful Data Warehouse?

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Effectively Communicating Survey Data

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Effectively Communicating Survey Data: Beyond Text Tables and Pie Charts A review of an article from Investor’s Business Daily and recommended improvements is covered in this presentation.   The topic of the article is “Obama Terrorism Grade”, a summary of a survey conducted in early April, 2009 by Technometrica Market Intelligence. The Results are summarized … Read more