President Barack Obama has appointed visual data guru Edward Tufte (previously mentioned: here) to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. Tufte will advise on such things as the Recovery.gov website, where citizens can punch their zip code into a track-the-money map and see all the recovery projects in their area. Bob Garfield of New York public radio's On The Media interviewed Tufte about the appointment this week (audio embedded below; transcript here). GARFIELD: Tufte has inspired a generation of innovators with his ideas for the efficient, clean and rich presentation of information. He’s a fan of The New York Times website,...

04 April, 2010

Contrarian reader Ken Clare thinks Contrarian's standards slipped with our post of a chart comparing US food subsidies: Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk." I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled. Update: A Diligent Reader award goes to Contrarian's insomniac friend Alistair Watt, who spent time with a ruler and...

13 March, 2010

Edward Tufte, the Yale University statistician known to Business Week as "the the Galileo of graphics," and to the New York Times as, "tbe da Vinci of data," explains why the iPhone works so well. The secret lies in the "magnificent and intense" resolution of its screen, and its "brilliant suppression" of content-stealing "computer administrative debris." Moneyquote: Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And, clutter and overload are not an attribute of information; they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design. And...

29 June, 2009