Friday, July 18, 2008

“I don’t care about the data …”

Attending a recent workshop on data visualization, the discussion after a presentation on a graphical display technique to visualize a particular type of data (sorry for not being more precise here, but the presenter would not like to be identified too easily) led to the quote of the speaker:

“I don’t care about the data, I am just interested in the method …”
which sparked a hefty discussion whether or not this can possibly be an answer a statistician is allowed to give - I would say “no”; what do you think ..?
Posted by Martin at 19:36:51 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Bill Gates and the User Interface Experience

Matt pointed me to this nice report on Bill Gates trying to download one of “his” products.

Here is the e-mail, he sent to some of his staff.

Make sure not to miss the performance from Dave Ross of KIRO-AM/710 when reading this e-mail - very nice.

I wish this Bill Gates would have been more effective during his active career!

Posted by Martin at 19:25:58 | Permalink | Comments (1) »

Can we easily find the “bad” teams … ?

Again, in 2008 the most interesting thing for a statistician following the Tour de France is to look for means to detect possible doping cases. Right now we have the total results for the first 11 stages for all teams, and a simple boxplot of total time after stage 11 against team - ranked by the median time - looks like this:
Total

Not that this is a final evidence, but the gap between the 5th and the 6th ranked team makes me a bit suspicious … Let’s see how things will further develop.

If anyone wants to come up with a sophisticated model, I am happy to share the data, we have collected so far.

Posted by Martin at 19:04:22 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Le Tour 2008

Here we go in the fourth year after the years 2007, 2006 and 2005.

Stage Results cumulative Time Ranks
Stage Total Rank
(click on the images to enlarge)

“The trace of a winner” - (a spanish winner makes me suspicious though …)

That’s it for this year! 

(Thanks to Sergej for updating the scripts) 

Posted by Martin at 21:05:13 | Permalink | Comments (3)