resources
presentations
Let me tell you about something.
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
writing
Writing
Poetry
Inked Sadness is a collection of poems written in that difficult time between being no longer young, but not yet old.
Expressions and Conversations of Love are short heart-breakers.
Scripts
Proverbial Man considers how our names and expectations limit our perceptions and freedoms. No answers are offered. I don't think I finished this.
The Surrogate echoes my own fears of fleeing from Poland in the early 80s. Or at least the fears I retroactively erected, to add drama. Count on the Polish for drama.
Narrative
Thirty Reasons should be enough to decide a place isn't worth returning to.
news + thoughts
Have data, will compare
In the March Points of Significance Nature Methods column, we continue our discussion of t-tests from November (Significance, P values and t-tests).
We look at what happens how uncertainty of two variables combines and how this impacts the increased uncertainty when two samples are compared and highlight the differences between the two-sample and paired t-tests.
When performing any statistical test, it's important to understand and satisfy its requirements. The t-test is very robust with respect to some of its assumptions, but not others. We explore which.
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of Significance: Comparing Samples — Part I Nature Methods 11:215-216.
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2013) Points of Significance: Significance, P values and t-tests Nature Methods 10:1041-1042.
Circos at British Library Beautiful Science Exhibit
Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time. The exhibit runs 20 February — 26 May 2014 and is free to the public. There is a good Nature blog writeup about it, a piece in The Guardian, and a great video that explains the the exhibit narrated by Johanna Kieniewicz, the curator.
I am privileged to contribute an information graphic to the exhibit in the Tree of Life section. The piece shows how sequence similarity varies across species as a function of evolutionary distance. The installation is a set of 6 30x30 cm backlit panels. They look terrific.
Think outside the bar—box plots
Quick, name three chart types. Line, bar and scatter come to mind. Perhaps you said pie too—tsk tsk. Nobody ever thinks of the box plot.
Box plots reveal details about data without overloading a figure with a full frequency distribution histogram. They're easy to compare and now easy to make with BoxPlotR (try it). In our fifth Points of Significance column, we take a break from the theory to explain this plot type and—I hope— convince you that they're worth thinking about.
The February issue of Nature Methods kicks the bar chart two more times: Dan Evanko's Kick the Bar Chart Habit editorial and a Points of View: Bar charts and box plots column by Mark Streit and Nils Gehlenborg.
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of Significance: Visualizing samples with box plots Nature Methods 11:119-120.
Wired Data|Life 2013 talk
I recently presented at the Wired Data|Life 2013 conference, sharing my thoughts on The Art and Science of Data Visualization.
For specialists, visualizations should expose detail to allow for exploration and inspiration. For enthusiasts, they should provide context, integrate facts and inform. For the layperson, they should capture the essence of the topic, narrate a story and deligt.
Wired's Brandon Keim wrote up a short article about me and some of my work—Circle of Life: The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data.
