Potential graduate-student unionization re-re-reversal?

New York University graduate students seems to have prevailed in letting a regional director of National Labor Relations Board hear arguments on a long-standing union drive at the university. NYU graduate students have the magic touch, since they were the first to overturn a 40-year 28-year precedent prohibiting graduate-student unions at private universities in 2000–only […]

y-axis at Zero

If your graphing for my class, or just in general, start your axis at zero. It seems trivial, but can have a large impact on the graph. This was apparent in a recent presentation by the Iowa Legislative Services Agency on budget revenues for the current year. Below is a graph (blue line) showing state […]

Tale of Two Stimuli

Two notable progress reports were released last Wednesday. The first is an essay by economists Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and Princeton economics, and Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics and former advisor to presidential candidate John McCain, on the impact of the federal stimulus program: …without the […]

I’m Not Familiar with Your Level

Ukraine’s President Yanukovych was caught up in a data visualization gaffe in front of a panel of economic experts. The chart he is holding reflects annual wages in Ukraine for the past six years. Notice the red bar is substantially lower than the prior years? It’s true salaries for Ukranians fell this past year, but […]

Juice: Higher Education

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 40 percent of students on college campuses are over the age of 25. “In general, there has been an increase in those over the age of 25 going back to school this past year,” said Tom Schenk, educational consultant for the Iowa Department of Education. Schenk […]

Oh the Humanities

The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of […]

Taxonomy of Data Visualization

This post is a part of a collection for an upcoming course on Data Visualization at the 2010 Mid-America Association for Institutional Research annual meeting. These posts will be collected and placed on the course website. They may also be modified as the course develops to increase clarity. An Economist article quotes Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, […]