Nate Silver And The Age of Data Journalism

A few days ago, the new version of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight went live, backed by ESPN. According to Silver’s observations, explained in his site’s manifesto, the market is ripe for a data-oriented journalism. I totally agree. A day doesn’t go by in which I hear or read an argument that painfully drags along because of… Continue reading Nate Silver And The Age of Data Journalism

How to build quick and free charts

Back in July 2013, the guys from released their Chartbuilder tool to the rest of the world. Quartz is a very successful online magazine. For their charting needs they use Chartbuilder, a web tool they built to streamline their cumbersome Excel-based process and convert it to a three step copy+paste, copy+paste, publish workflow. Author David Yanofksy:… Continue reading How to build quick and free charts

Moneyballing criminal justice

One of the problems of justice systems everywhere is that they depend on subjectivity and have near zero data-mining expertise. Because of that, tons of money are wasted in keeping low-risk offenders in jail. As the attorney general for New Jersey, Anne Milgram changed the panorama of her state’s criminal justice system. By applying statistics… Continue reading Moneyballing criminal justice

A primer on Visual Encoding

Michael Dubakov has this great introduction to visual encoding, along with samples and easy to remember rules, so you don’t mess up the next time you’re trying to visualize data.