Visualizing Ebola

The Guardian recently posted a dataviz comparing Ebola to other infectious diseases. It’s from a forthcoming book entitled Knowledge is Beautiful and it is indeed beautiful. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad viz. Below is my alternative viz (using the Guardian’s data), along with a critique. The basic issue is evolution. Because viruses reproduce quickly so they’re a great […]

Back to Basics

Aaron at Plan Space from Outer Nine has a valuable insight about how standard statistics textbooks often favor technique over understanding. I think we could extend approach this from “central tendency” to the broader question of “association.” We tend to view various measures of association  (for example, Chi-square χ2, Spearman’s rho ρ, Pearson r, R2, etc.) […]