Visualization

Fun with Ngrams – Art, Science, Programming

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ December 19, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

A recent gift from Google Labs – the NGram viewer, a fascinating tool that searches the Google Books database for words and phrases, and charts their relative frequency. For example – let’s take some of the themes of this blog … Apparently, Art and Science have grown closer, and enjoy a somewhat parallel existence together. [...]

Art and Science of Data Visualization

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 7, 2010 ⋅ One comment

“Data Visualization” has been an extremely active and popular topic for a few years – we can use Google’s Timeline search feature to see the growth in interest since 1980: That local high in July of this year was due in no small part to David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful talk at TED this past [...]

Sorting with Sound

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 23, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

via Geek.com – yes, I subscribe to stuff like this in my RSS reader … I thought this was interesting on two levels … The Engineering student within appreciates the differences in sorting techniques (although I think I could speed up that bubble sort …) I also think these videos provide a simple illustration of [...]

Managing Change: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 15, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Often, when trying to figure out how to “make things happen”, your focus switches between multiple targets. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And How can I get the others to understand what I am doing? Real change happens along a continuum that stretches from The Big Idea to Real Results, and [...]

Data Visualization: How (2 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 19, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

The short answer, as you know, is that it’s impossible to tell you how to be insightful and imaginative in a single blog post. All I can do is point you in the general direction, and (hopefully) ignite a little spark. What’s the Goal? and, Where to Begin? I previously talked about the growing calls [...]

Data Visualization: Why (1 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 13, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Between business requests and breathless vendors, I am getting caught up in the growing tide of interest in “data visualizations” – managers requesting highly interactive, highly graphical, highly intuitive analytics interfaces (think Minority Report). But what are we trying to accomplish here? We keep on hearing about “executive dashboards”, a heads-up display of in-my-face KPIs, [...]

Linkfest: Data Visualization

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 7, 2008 ⋅ One comment

I’m a long-time fan of effective visualizations, and I’ve often written about the effective use of visual information when making presentations or communicating complex information. I’ve subscribed to my share of blogs and feeds on the topic, and have amassed quite a backlog of interesting links … presented here for your hyperlinking enjoyment … Best [...]

Optimizing the Wrong Part of Knowledge Management

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 16, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I sat in on the report-out session from a kaizen event this week, and something occurred to me as I reviewed a ton of interesting findings in a very short time … Best Practice Self-contained deliverables are the most powerful tools for knowledge knowledge transfer you can have in your organization. I’m talking about a [...]

Communicating Complex Technical Concepts

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 21, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

We’ve faced this problem a few times, as we roll out a distributed application across a network of remote locations. A fairly typical challenge is to explain the impact of a technical architecture improvement in a relevant, meaningful way – without resorting to techno-jargon. A good approach includes: Keep it short – Too much detail [...]

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