Dec 7 2022
During the Van-of-Nerds Tour de France, in 9/22, one of our hosts said, “It’s one thing to collect data, but it’s another to make simple and usable summaries for people.” Some of the visualizations we saw at several sites, however, showed that our hosts underestimate what it takes to generate “simple and usable summaries.”
Jan 30 2021
[The featured image is an ISOTYPE from Marie Neurath (1936)]
Maps of symbols connected by lines are the most common form of graphic communication about operations, next to bar charts, pie charts, and time series. The symbols may be a variety of pictograms and there may be different types of lines, including arrows, double-headed arrows with a variety of arrowheads, with dashed lines of varying thicknesses…
This is about what you can do with such maps beyond communicating, and the challenges of mapping systems that don’t fit on one slide. It is also about improving current practices.
May 23 2018
If you google “data-science + manufacturing,” what comes back is recycled hype about the factory of the future. The same vision has been painted before and hasn’t come to pass. Yet we are expected to believe that this time it will be a “4th industrial revolution.” Whether it’s true or not, this happy talk is no help in today’s factories. “Data science” covers real advances in the art of working with data, and the more relevant question is what it can do to improve existing operations.
This is not just about reaping tangible benefits today rather than hypothetical ones in the future but also about acquiring skills needed to design new plants and production lines 5 years from now. These publications endow technology with a power to drive innovation that it doesn’t have. It is only a means for people to innovate. Their ability to do so hinges on their mastery of the technology, which is acquired by using it in continuous improvement.
Jan 16 2015
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet, but according to some of the more reliable sources, during World War II:
Source: www.squawkpoint.com
This is a great story both about effective visualization of series of events in space-time and about proper interpretation in the face of sample bias.
Manufacturing, thankfully, is less dangerous than flying bombers in World War II was, but it is still more dangerous than it should be. Posting the locations of injuries on a map of the human body is also an effective way to identify which body parts are most commonly affected, and which safety improvements are most effective.
But are all injuries reported? Many organizations blame the victims for lowering their safety metrics, and discourage reporting. As a consequence, we can expect under-reporting and a bias towards injuries severe enough that reporting is unavoidable.
If you get data on an entire population, or if you thoughtfully select a representative sample, you can avoid bias, but many of the most commonly used samples are biased, often in ways that are difficult to figure out.
Customer surveys of product quality, for example, are biased by self-selection of the respondents. Are unhappy customers more likely to take the opportunity to vent than happy customers to praise? If so, to what extent? The effect of self-selection is even stronger for posting reviews on websites.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Sep 23 2023
Orbit Charts, Revisited
Data visualization is not just the art of presenting data to an audience. Upstream from this, you use visualizations in data cleaning to identify defective points, and in exploratory analysis, to identify patterns of interest. Then, you validate these patterns with a more formal analysis. Once confident that you have findings of value to communicate, you worry about making a compelling presentation.
Nick Desbarats and I had a long exchange on LinkedIn prompted by his article Connected Scatterplots Make Me Feel Dumb in Nightingale, the Data Visualization Society journal, on 8/29/2023. What he called Connected Scatterplot is what I call orbit charts, and I have found them helpful, particularly in analysis.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 1 • Tags: data science, Orbit chart, scatterplot, Visualization