From FlowingData:

Review: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics

Add another book to the growing library of guides on how to make information graphics the right way. Dona M. Wong, former graphics director of The Wall Street Journal and now strategy director for information Design at Siegel+Gale, provides the dos and don'ts of data presentation in The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics.

First Impressions

Given Wong's background, you can make a pretty good guess about the examples used. They're not graphics from The Journal but they do look a lot like them. The book description also makes a point of highlighting that Wong was a student of Edward Tufte, which was a big hint on what the book is like.

The guide is on the smaller side at about 150 pages of content, but it's mostly a visual book. There is about as much text as there are graphic examples, which I like. [more]

Freakonomics - New York Times Blog
February 17, 2010, 3:00 pm
Predicting the Next Enron By FREAKONOMICS
Via the Wall Street Journal, here’s further evidence that companies “tweak” quarterly earnings numbers. Joseph Grundfest and Nadya Malenko analyzed almost half a million earnings reports from 1980-2006. They discovered that when companies want to appear more successful than they are, they often massage their per-share earnings numbers upward by a tenth of one cent. The evidence? The number 4 appears significantly less often than expected in the post-decimal digits of earnings reports. In the U.S., per-share earnings are reported as pennies, so bumping that post-decimal digit from a 4 to a 5 results in the overall number being rounded up by a full penny. Grundfest and Malenko call the practice quadrophobia. While the tweaking may be legal in some cases, the authors also found that “quadrophobes are more likely to restate financials and to be named as defendants in SEC Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER).” Or, as Grundfest told the Journal, quadrophobia serves as “a leading indicator of a company that’s going to have an accounting issue.”

GIS Data Show Relationship Between Violence, Liquor Retailers

February 17, 2010 in GIS, Social Science

Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

18 – 22 February 2010, San Diego, California

As cities grapple with liquor-related violence, new data suggests zoning commissions may want to take a second look at where they put liquor retailers. IU Bloomington criminologist William Pridemore and Geographer Tony Grubesic are in the midst of analyzing new Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data that seem to suggest violent crime is more likely to occur in the vicinity of stores that sell liquor expressly for off-premise consumption. Violence, they are learning, is less likely to occur near other types of establishments that offer alcohol, such as bars, pubs and restaurants. Pridemore and Grubesic have conducted their studies in Cincinnati (Ohio) neighborhoods using blocks as a unit of analysis. Pridemore led the research and is the session organizer. Grubesic will speak about the scientists’ collaborative research, which is using GIS and other spatial analysis techniques to learn more about human behavior patterns.

“Using GIS and Spatial Analysis To Better Understand Patterns and Causes of Violence,” Monday, Feb. 22, from 9:45 a.m. to 11:15 a.m., Room 5A

Grubesic and Pridemore will take part in a press briefing regarding “Using GIS and Spatial Analysis to Better Understand Patterns and Causes of Violence,” at 2:00 p.m. PST on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the San Diego Convention Center. Please visit the Press Room beforehand for the event’s location (TBD).

To speak with Pridemore or Grubesic, please contact Steve Chaplin, University Communications, at 606-356-6551 or stjchap@indiana.edu.

[Source: Indiana University press release]

http://www.rutgerscps.org/gisbook/dwnld39629.html

"From the BACK COVER This book, GIS for Public Safety, focuses on ESRI’s ArcGIS functionality (the most popular GIS software, worldwide) and presents many of the tools and techniques that are commonly used by public safety researchers, analysts, and practitioners. It gives simple steps for descriptive, exploratory, and explanatory mapping tasks and includes concise but meaningful discussions to let you critically assess and accurately apply the software to your own unique specialty. This provides a solid foundation for advanced spatial thinking and permits you to utilize GIS technology in your own innovative ways. Its comprehensive content makes it the perfect coursebook or reference manual for students, researchers, crime analysts, and other GIS users at all skill levels. To use a construction metaphor, this book is intended to teach a carpenter what tools are in his toolbox and how to use them. This instills confidence in his ability to apply these tools to any job when needed. Other books teach the carpenter specifically how to build a house. However, skills needed to build a house might fail the carpenter when he needs to build furniture instead. GIS for Public Safety focuses on a complete working knowledge of the toolbox to let the carpenter accurately apply the tools to his or her own unique specialty."

From the Society of Newspaper Designers via FlowingData:

The making of the NYT’s Netflix graphic

January 20th, 2010

By Kevin Quealy

One of The Times’ recent graphics, “A Peek Into Netflix Queues,” ended up being one of our more popular graphics of the past few months. (A good roundup of what people wrote is here). Since then, there have been a few questions about the how the graphic was made and Tyson Evans, a friend and colleague, thought it might interest SND members. (I bother Tyson with questions about CSS and Ruby pretty regularly, so I owe him a few favors.)

Most readers are probably interested in the interactive graphic, although I will say that we also ran a lovely full-page graphic in print in the Metropolitan section, which goes out to readers in the New York region. That graphic had a lot of interesting statistical analysis – in fact, it would have been nice to get some analysis in the web version, more on that later – but for this I will focus mostly on the web version. If there are questions about the print graphic, I will make sure I get Amanda Cox to try to explain cluster analysis to me again.

First is the data itself. Jo Craven McGinty, a CAR reporter, was in contact with Netflix to obtain a database of the top 50 movies in each ZIP code for every ZIP in the country. That’s about 1.9 million records. The database did not include the number of people renting the movie – just the rank. (We [more here: http://www.snd.org/2010/01/nyt-netflix-graphic ]

Thanks to Steve Doig for the pointer to....

More Visualization Links on Twitter

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010

In a recent post I showed the Top 20 Individual Data Visualizations Mentioned on Twitter and remarked that many of the most frequently mentioned twitter links were to collections of visualizations. Shown below is a meta list of the top collection-type data visualization or infographic links.

Top Collections of Data Visualization Links

1. 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization - Webdesigner Depot
   
   
2. Data Visualization and Infographics Resources - Smashing Magazine
   
   
3. 15 Stunning Examples of Data Visualization - Web Design Ledger...   more »