Baseball Stats

ESPN’s interesting article on pitch count also contained some ugly graphs. The articles thesis is on starting pitchers now regularly pitching fewer than 100 pitches. Exhibit 1: Transparency and Area Charts Area plots don’t work well when they overlap. The above chart had to use transparency, which makes it difficult to associate colors with the […]

Selection Bias and Online Dating

New York Times has an article on the science behind online dating sites, like eHarmony and Chemistry.com, that base matches on intensive surveys. The article notes: Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony, said that studies his company had conducted of married people who met through eHarmony and a control group who met in other […]

To standardize or not standardize?

Andrew Gelman compares standardized and unstandardized coefficients. Gelman has previously written a paper which addresses most of the shortcomings to unstandarized coefficients (e.g., raw coefficients, the stuff you see as a default) and addresses the issues brought up in the post. Unfortunately, he didn’t address the problems I was most interested in seeing. He writes: […]

New York Times’ Take on Business Cycles

The New York Times built an interactive graphic on business cycles since the the early 1970s. Instead of displaying a business cycle as something that looks like a sine wave, NYT uses a Cartesian plane with each quandrant representing either expansion, slowdown, downturn, and recovery. They use industrial production as a proxy for the business […]

Using Uploader.py to upload from Picasa to Flickr – Repost

Below is a re-post from the original genericface blog. By far the most popular post, it has been replaced by easier tools, such as picasa2flickr. Original date: March 14th, 2006 Picasa is by far my favorite photo management software. Flickr is the arguably the best online photo sharing site (Zooomr is a rising competitor). However, […]

Bayes is the New Black Presentation

From 2007 International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Science of Biology in Exeter, England. <script async data-id=”4e80f3b81c938e0060000353″ data-ratio=”1.3333333333333333″ src=”//speakerdeck.com/assets/embed.js”></script>