Fishing in the Bay

A recent article in the Age pointed out that Melbourne’s dams are approaching 50% capacity for the first time in 4 years.  They included a time series of % storage for the past 40 years which tells the whole story pretty well, placing the last four years of drought in context, as well as the recent rains. Unfortunately, they added a statistical summary which, in my opinion, ranks with the worst ever*. Read the rest of this entry »

A common lament of the naughties is that we are drowning in data. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could swim instead of drown? I have recently become aware of a new data visualization tool called Pivot, developed by Microsoft Live Labs.

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At the one extreme we have exotic financial derivatives that no-one knows how to value as well as opaque bundles of high risk loans and low risk bonds that no-one knew how to value either. At the other extreme, we have the simplistic nonsense known as technical analysis that anyone can understand, but happens to be bollocks. No wonder the world financial system is such a ferrel beast. Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting country’s GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story – and other  stories-  much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.

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Below is  a nice little graphic that I generated from an exploration tool provided by the good folks at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developement. It shows the relationship of population distribution and GDP per head. Each point is a country. The axes are % of population below 14 and above 50. So countries in the top left endure the terrible aging armageddon that Australia is supposedly heading for (lots of old people and few young people). Bottom right countries are (dynamic?) youthful countries. The GDP per head is measured by the size of the blobs.

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The graph below was provided by recent Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. It shows a geographic map of the swing from 2004 to 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

The Olympic medal count is briefly replacing the AFL ladder as the most talked about sports ranking. The latest count is HERE. The United States reckon they are winning because they have more medals. Which got me, and no doubt many others, thinking - to what extent do Olympic medals measure national sporting prowess? And who is the greatest Olympian?

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My colleague, Peter Cebon, has sent me the graphic below which shows a time series of temperature, CO2 and sea levels. It is actually a pretty good graphic. While it is true that one generally counsels against putting three plots, on different scales, on the same graph, I think that this one works pretty well, especially with the three axes at the right color coded to agree with the time series. The resolution is not that great so I suggest you download it in pdf form HERE.

On a recent ABC interview, a well known scientist made the following statement about global temperatures.

Actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Is she right?

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If statistics is the process of turning data into information then our most useful tool is the graphic (intermediated of course by a model). I would be interested and grateful if readers of the blog could point me to what they consider to be the most successful and/or innovative graphics they have seen. Links would be especially useful so that I can collect them for another post. The example below has been claimed to be the best statistical graphic ever drawn! He obviously lived in an age of hyperbole as he was himself described as “the Leonardo da Vinci of Data”! Anyway, it is a pretty impressive graphic and I want to describe it below.

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