shiny things in messy little piles

Year: 2007 (Page 1 of 12)

Why are We Still Reading the Box Scores?

This after­noon I have been look­ing for non-business exam­ples of graph­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of data. Par­tic­u­lar­ly I’ve been look­ing for good exam­ples of sports sta­tis­tics pre­sent­ed as sum­ma­ry graphs. The base­ball equiv­a­lent of a week­ly sales trend by region graph, if you will. 

I am under­whelmed. There are a cou­ple of sites out there doing his­tor­i­cal graph­ing. Includ­ing (not recent­ly updat­ed) Base­ball Graphs. But the major sports sites (ESPN, and the league offi­cial sites.) Still rely on the tra­di­tion­al text and numer­i­cal “box score” that I first learned to read sit­ting with my dad at the break­fast table. There’s a nice exam­ple with expla­na­tion of a base­ball box score on wikipedia for those of you not lucky enough to have grown up with base­ball for breakfast.

Check out this ESPN report on theColorado/Boston game (21.oct.07) Oth­er than the addi­tion the cute team logo icon next to the game high­lights, it looks pret­ty much the way it did in the morn­ing paper. Why?

My best guess… We learned to fol­low the game via text and num­bers pre­sent­ed in the box score for­mat. It serves it pur­pose well and we know how to read it. We don’t want to learn to read some oth­er (visu­al) language.

Better Explained — This is what the web can be.

Bet­ter Explained is a web site cre­at­ed by Kalid Azad based on the idea that 

There’s always a bet­ter way to explain a top­ic. Insights are flu­id, muta­ble, and work for dif­fer­ent people. 

He focus­es on math and pro­gram­ming (web tech­nolo­gies) with a lit­tle bit of the kitchen sink thrown in.

His abil­i­ty to use a nar­ra­tive voice and the free­dom to add graph­ics put these expla­na­tions in a dif­fer­ent cat­e­go­ry from the more author­i­ta­tive voic­es heard on wikipedia but avoid the we have every­thing and here’s five ads too feel of about.com.

His Anoth­er Look at Prime Num­bers takes the oth­er­wise for math freaks only top­ic of these odd­ly behav­ing num­bers and looks at them from a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive Chem­istry. Odd and amus­ing and like­ly to stay with you for while. 

While some experts quib­ble with a few of his state­ments. (Polite­ly.) The ideas are made clear for the lay­man — and read­ing the com­ments will show you where the lit­tle gaps were cov­ered over.

Nice job.

I’ve got his two arti­cles on ver­sion con­trol queued up for “wait­ing around for oth­er peo­ple” reading. 

How’s the Weather Out There?

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing a bunch of our old fam­i­ly web­site (Black Dog Farm) to a new serv­er (Black­dog and Mag­pie.) It’s not the pret­ti­est web­site you’ll ever see but it serves well as a sandbox.

At the moment I“m work­ing on build­ing a new set of weath­er report­ing pages. We have a fair­ly com­plete set of weath­er obser­va­tion instru­ments and an old machine in the serv­er cab­i­net that records that data from them. Here at the MCWD I can fire up a pro­gram called Vir­tu­al Weath­er Sta­tion and look at many (many) graphs, charts, and reports. The trick now is to get all that love­ly data up on the web. (I’ll detail some of the strengths and weak­ness­es of VWS in anoth­er post.)

In addi­tion to dis­play­ing our total geek­i­ness by hav­ing live weath­er report­ing on our web­site, we use the report­ed data to keep track of some of the highs and lows of rur­al life. Like pow­er line destroy­ing winds and freez­ing temperatures. 

Today’s quandary is about what data to put where on which page and how to arrange it.

The main item on the first page is easy. VWS pro­vides a nice sum­ma­ry graph­ic called “Broad­cast” that is uploaded via ftp. 

Weather summary

But what to do with the rest of the space? In par­tic­u­lar what to do with the left col­umn? I’m torn between pro­vid­ing cool stuff for vis­i­tors, like a rotat­ing North­west weath­er triv­ia and pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at the house. 

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