In March 2016, I guest-wrote Stephen Few's popular quarterly VIsual Business Intelligence Newsletter. The topic was one that came up often enough in training workshops to merit a longer write-up (i.e., a "deep dive"): how to visualize data sets that include a combination of very small values (i.e., close to zero) and very large values (i.e., far from zero). Creating a standard line or bar chart based on such data sets yields bars or lines that are too small to visually estimate or accurately compare with one another, so the newsletter suggests some creative solutions to address this common challenge.
Read moreMindware: Tools for Smart Thinking (book review)
Richard Nisbett's Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking should be required reading for every university student (or anyone else who wants to make fewer reasoning errors). The book consists of an eclectic but extremely practical collection of "tools for smart thinking", covering concepts as varied as the sunk cost fallacy, confirmation bias, the law of large numbers, the endowment effect, and multiple regression analysis, among many others.
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