Robin Williams (from her website: “writer. teacher. mom. not the actor”) has developed the widely cited CRAP design principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. These are powerful general purpose design principles, but a few additional principles are helpful with respect to the display of quantitative information. Inspired by the work of Edward Tufte, I propose…

“We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.” – John Naisbitt For the love of statistics, please stop using the words “reporting” and “analytics” interchangeably. Reporting is the display of information. Analytics is the interpretation of information. Analytics is the process that turns information into insight, reporting into understanding. Every time someone uses the…

The description of surge pricing on Uber’s website begins with the carefully crafted sentence: “Uber rates increase to ensure reliability when demand cannot be met by the number of drivers on the road.” What that really means is that fares are higher at the worst possible time. If it weren’t for surge pricing, Uber would be…

Check out Bitten Labs’ new white paper on how to repeatably identify top data science talent. The process has been informed by hiring processes at many organizations with effective data science groups, refined through several iterations, and tested with hundreds of applicants. The white paper is a significantly expanded version of our popular blog post. The…

Data scientists: many companies want them, but few know how to identify them. A widely-cited 2011 McKinsey report highlights the steep shortage of analytical talent capable of extracting value from data. With demand outpacing supply and companies hiring faster than they can find good people, the data scientist title is rapidly becoming diluted as it…