While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:
On this screen you have three clicks to use any way that you’d like. You can spread them across three different items, load them all up on one item or use less that all three. When finished, a heat map is displayed which I found more valuable than the typical star graph. In fact, I noticed that those same terms were used in the description of the video. Very clever!
About ten years ago I collaborated with Mark Peck (currently president/CEO of ApexxGroup, LLC) on visual representation of customer buying behavior analysis. At the time we thought we were pretty clever since we were able to make effective use of bubble charts to compare changes in customer retention, defection and overall value at a decile-by-decile basis. Our clients loved the work since it reduced large tables of mind-numbing numbers to simple graphics that focused attention on the critical patterns. On limitation of our charts is that they only compared two years of data so it was difficult to show changes over longer periods of time.
Today Mark shared this TED video. It’s a few years old but the interactive nature of these relatively standard bubble charts makes for a powerful presentation. Rosling used software created by his affiliate gapminder.org. Though we didn’t have that ten years ago, it now occurs to me that we could have simply used a PowerPoint slide presentation to accomplish a similar effect.
In addition to the great graphics, Rosling is both entertaining and thought provoking. Your thoughts?
Source: TED: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen, Feb, 2006
I just stumbled on a great article published at The McKinsey Quarterly earlier this year. In it, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, urges executives to sharpen their understanding of analytics and the relationship between technology and innovation. Buried in the article was this quote:
I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.
People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that
computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The
ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it,
to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate
it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational
level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college
kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous
data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand
that data and extract value from it.
What better way to start the month than to immerse yourself in some excellent data visualizations. webdesigner depot has assembled 50 Great Examples of Data Visualzations including Narratives 2.0 visualization of Beethoven’s 5th.
This is interesting. Zappos let’s you watch shoe purchases pop up on a US map as they happen. Take a look. Kind of mesmerizing. See a live map here.
This screen shot was taken at 8 a.m. ET. No surprise the rest of the country is still sleeping. What are your impressions? Just fun stuff or meaningful information? Could it create impulse purchases?
Though not an analytics book per se, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization contains some interesting analysis on the types of groups found within organizations. I found it an interesting and valuable read. Actually, I didn’t actually “read” it. As my wife says, I cheated by listening to the audiobook. For a limited time, you can download the audiobook for free from the Zappo’s web-site.
I just started reading Outliers: The Story of Success on my iPod touch. It’s the first Kindle format book that I’ve purchased. So far, I like the experience. Here’s a riddler from the book:
Why do most Canadian hockey stars have birthdays in January, February or March? Probably has something to do with being born in the dead of winter and better able to tolerate the cold and icy conditions. Right?
Would that explain why Czechoslovakian soccer stars have birthdays in January, February or March? Then why do almost twice as many US major league baseball players have August birthdays than July? Why don’t birthday patterns show up for football or basketball players?
Hold that thought.
Gladwell goes on to demonstrate that it typically takes 10,000 hours to truly master a professional level position such as pro athlete, musician, ballerina, etc.
An athlete born six months after a future star starts only 4,380 hours in the hole. Over time that would seem irrelevant. However, the sports mentioned above typically have a age cutoff date for young teams. Soccer and hockey cuttoffs are typically January 1 so to players born only a day apart (say Dec 31, 2001 and Jan 1, 2002) will be on two different teams. And that “younger” one will be the oldest on the team so after a few years he or she could be significantly larger and more mature that the other teams. Often, these individuals will get special attention including spots on all star or club level teams. Over time, they’ll put in significantly more time than the players born at other times of the year and will get to the magic 10,000 hours sooner.
Makes one wonder about the validity of cut-off dates. Any ideas for a better system? Do similar practices have implications outside of the sporting world?
I stumbled upon this video and related files will doing some research in emerging technologies. Good stuff! The embedded video is a five minute montage of technologies currently in the works at Microsoft Office Labs. Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division gave a keynote at Wharton a few weeks ago. I was so fascinated by the montage, I was able to track down a video of the entire keynote, text of that presentation and the PowerPoint slides he used. (Note – if the keynote video doesn’t work, visit the text of the presentation page and try to access that one.) According to Elop,
Watch carefully because in every frame there’s something new and advancing in terms of how technology will enable the improvement of productivity for businesses and individuals.
In the keynote video, he actually demonstrates several of the technologies. Keep your eyes open for the following:
Digital newspaper
Coffee cup with embedded thermometer
“Dual sided” wall for cross-world collaboration
Automatic translation
School kids write on wall in own language – auto translation on other side
Digital wallet
o Touch virtual computer to transfer medical records
o Flick to find appropriate “card”
VR helmet
Plant scanner that recognizes plant species
Key chain that acts as a PDA
Medical data entry pads
Wall displays for project collaboration
Ability to transfer data from wall display to personal device by taking a “snap shot”
Dynamic pricing displays at Target
Auto sorting of shopping list based on location in store
Location aware “presence”
“X-ray glasses” type panel that can ID objects inside cabinets
Sticky sorter affinity diagramming tool on a wall
Which do you feel are most probable? Which could have the greatest impact on your work? Fill up the comments.
The site has been conspicuously quite over the past six months. A lot has been happing on the home and work front so I’ve neglected some of my writing duties. Still reading, researching, processing and collecting ideas to share. Just no opportunity to post them! I hope to be more reliable in 2009.
Is Microsoft Surface what an iPod Touch wants to be when it grows up or does the Surface aspire to be like the iPod? Either way, the technology is neat. MSNBC has been using it to analyze the current presidential race. Take a look.
While poking around TED yesterday, I was surprised to notice that the standard five star video rating system had disappeared. (I’ve been watching TED videos on my iPod Touch instead of the web-site all year so the stars may have left awhile back.) After finishing the video, I clicked rate and the following popped up:
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