A question came up recently about variations in the age at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation for a female human - with regards to the environment. A comparison by country seemed like a reasonable first step in noting whether there were in fact any significant, potentially environmental, differences in this age. A quick … Continue reading Average age at menarche by country
Tag: Visualisation
Books I read in 2017
Long term readers (hi!) may recall my failure to achieve the target I had of reading 50 books in 2016. I had joined the 2016 Goodreads reading challenge, logged my reading activity, and hence had access to the data needed track my progress at the end of the year. It turns out that 41 books … Continue reading Books I read in 2017
The Datasaurus: a monstrous Anscombe for the 21st century
Most people trained in the ways of data visualisation will be very familiar with Anscombe's Quartet. For the uninitiated, it's a set of 4 fairly simple looking X-Y scatterplots that look like this. What's so great about those then? Well, the reason data vizzers get excited starts to become clear when you realise that the dotted grey … Continue reading The Datasaurus: a monstrous Anscombe for the 21st century
Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
Anyone who studies any amount of the history of, or the best practice for, data visualisation will almost certainly come across a handful of "classic" vizzes. These specific transformations of data-into-diagram have stuck with us through the mists of time in order to become examples that teachers, authors, conference speakers and the like repeatedly pick … Continue reading Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
Books I read in 2016
Reading is one of the favoured hobbies in the DabblingWithData household. In 2016 my beloved fiance invited me to participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. It's simple enough - you set a target and then see if you can read that many books. The challenge does have its detractors; you can see that an obsession with it will perversely incentivise reading … Continue reading Books I read in 2016
5 Power BI features that might make Tableau users a little jealous
New year, new blog post, new tool version to play with! It's clear that the field of data-related stuff progresses extremely rapidly at present, and hence it behoves those of us of an analyst bent to, now and then, go explore tools that we don't use day-to-day. We may already have our favourites in each … Continue reading 5 Power BI features that might make Tableau users a little jealous
Do good and bad viz choices exist?
Browsing the wonderful timeline of Twitter one evening, I noted an interesting discussion on subjects including Tableau Public, best practice, chart choices and dataviz critique. It's perhaps too long to go into here, but this tweet from Chris Love caught my eye. https://twitter.com/ChrisLuv/status/788541483355873281 Not being particularly auspicious with regards to summarising my thoughts into 140 characters, I wanted to explore some thoughts around … Continue reading Do good and bad viz choices exist?
The Tableau #MakeoverMonday doesn’t need to be complicated
For a while, a couple of key members of the insatiably effervescent Tableau community, Andy Cotgreave and Andy Kriebel, have been running a "Makeover Monday" activity. Read more and get involved here - but a simplistic summary would be that they distribute a nicely processed dataset on a topic of the day that relates to someone else's existing visualisation, and all the rest … Continue reading The Tableau #MakeoverMonday doesn’t need to be complicated
The EU referendum: voting intention vs voting turnout
Next month, the UK is having a referendum on the question of whether it should remain in the European Union, or leave it. All us citizens are having the opportunity to pop down to the ballot box to register our views. And in the mean time we're subjected to a fairly horrendous mishmash of "facts" and arguments as … Continue reading The EU referendum: voting intention vs voting turnout
Unsafe abortions: visualising the “preventable pandemic”
In the past few weeks, I was appalled to read that an UK resident was given a prison sentence for the supposed "crime" of having an abortion. This happened because she lives in Northern Ireland, a country where having an abortion is in theory punishable by a life sentence in jail - unless the person in need happens … Continue reading Unsafe abortions: visualising the “preventable pandemic”
Dabbling with Data 