Tableau Training by Freakalytics, Orlando, FL, Jan 26-28, 2010

Announcing the availability of our first Tableau Training location in 2010- sunny, warm Orlando, FL! Topics include visual analysis for presentation, data exploration and dashboard design. Tableau Certification is also available. Read the details and find other upcoming locations in 2010 at http://www.Freakalytics.com/training. Freakalytics also works with many leading organizations to present our highly-rated training … Read more

Did the super-smart (numerati) cause the near economic collapse?

This editorial highlights a fascinating yet simple theory, that super-smart people (the numerati) have created extremely complex and little understood financial instruments that helped drive us to the brink of economic ruin. These instruments originally had applications of merit that were reasonable. However, the profit potential was too large and the opportunity for application in almost any area of investing was simply too great a temptation. Over the past decade, derivatives have become the instrument of choice for a variety of hedge funds, investment firms and even once staid and conservative insurance companies.

AIG is an excellent example of where these instruments can take a company. To date, AIG has required “just” $183 billion in taxpayer bailouts to date.   That’s $183,000,000,000.00 or greater than the combined endowments of the top 15 universities in the US (ranked by endowment as of 2008.)   Wow, we could have endowed another 15 top universities in the US with just the losses created by AIG!

2008-Endowments-by-University

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Listen to the Analytic Talk Show with Stacey Barr

“A Week in the Life of an Analyst Rock Star: Using Analytics to Dramatically Boost Bottom Lines” You can download the examples discussed here (Adobe PDF file). Once you have the examples downloaded, click here to listen to the recorded webcast (download as an MP3 file). The case studies and topics discussed on this webcast … Read more

The seven habits of analyst rock stars!

Implement and practice these seven habits to make your work relevant, timely and actionable for the business and your customers! Collect, discuss and understand  the questions that matter for your customers and business owners.   Working with the business, determine how valuable the various questions are and whether they can be acted upon.   How … Read more

Rapid Graphs- Tableau for Customer Segmentation and Lifetime Value Analysis

This was presented at the Tableau Conference 2009. It is about the tremendous opportunities to leverage customer segmentation and lifetime value data at the individual customer level. Click here for the presentation. Identifying segments for every customer can unlock long-hidden value for your marketing team. Combining this information with Tableau creates a simple means for … Read more

How the average American spends their income

It is frustrating to see valuable information hidden in well-meaning, but uninformative charts. FlowingData.com referenced just such an article, “How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck“.

The chart in the original article at Visual Economics is indeed attractive. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to understand.   Key data relationships that should jump off of the chart are obscured by the donut chart and excessive chart text or “chart junk”.

Here are several accessible and simple ways to present this fascinating data.   All of these examples were created with Tableau.

How the average American spends their income

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tableau public available from the iPhone, with interactivity — amazing!

Here is a screenshot from my iPhone of my recently posted S&P composite dashboard with tableau public!
tableau public from iPhone

It’s truly amazing that the new tableau public product works wonderfully with every major desktop web browser. However, I was surprised to view tableau public from an iPhone. Even more surprising, I could use much of the interactivity without a mouse or keyboard! Kudos to the Tableau Software engineering team.

This feat is even more impressive when you consider that many popular web charting apps, like Google Finance are static on the iPhone. Google Analytics displays empty boxes in place of your expected graphs.

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Stephen Few’s latest book, “Now you see it”

Stephen’s latest book is a brilliant interplay of simple to advanced statistical concepts with powerful visual equivalents and methods. It offers wonderful guidance with great examples around visualizing time series, correlations and multivariate analysis problems. It will have a major impact for many years to come in changing how business analysts work, think and improve … Read more