DataDaze

Best and Weirdest Charts in 2018 Nate Silver's 538 put out their 45 best and weirdest charts in 2018 Scrolling through it is interesting to note the variety of charts. Some are interactive, some are static. Some are familiar but more are unique chart types. Types you don't see in your 'excel chart options'. Yet, they are trying to convey information to a wide audience so they must be clear. Must use color well.Many have as many words as they do marks. Most put the thesis right in the chart title Another year-end list can be found on Tableau . It is interesting the difference between the two sites.  It feels to me that Tableau data visualizations  featured here are made for data people by data people. Where as 538's are a bit simpler for a larger audience.  Most of the Tableau chart require you to interact before you can get useful information.  One of the most interesting charts is the Harry Potter Spells  chart. I don't know...

The Grammar of Graphics and Tidy Data Grammar of Graphics If you have used R you have probably used ggplot2, the go-to plotting package. This package was created by Hadley Wickham. He describes ggplot in depth in this paper "A grammar of graphics is a tool that enables us to concisely describe the components  of a graphic. Such a grammar allows us to move beyond named graphics (e.g., the “scatterplot”) and gain insight into the deep structure that underlies statistical graphics." It builds on the paper by Wilkinson, Anand, and Grossman (2005)  and implements the ideas to create superior graphs. I highly recommend reading both of these.  Thinking in terms of a grammar of graphics helps you intuit how to visualize what you want. It will save you time and effort trying to memorize the syntax for creating a bar chart vs a stacked bar chart with a dual axis. One downside, though, is you will start seeing all the limitations of your current 'all in one' graphing so...

CRON CRON is a job scheduler on Unix and Unix-like systems.  If, for example, you have a python script that aggregates metrics from different parts of your business and store them in a database table, you can easily do this if you already have access a unix or linux server using cron.  There are other, similar tools you may have also heard of. Jenkins for continuous integration. Airflow developed at AirBnB for workflow management (which has the added benefit of a web interface for people with less comfort on the command line). When your team gets to a certain size you will need to move on to a more robust tool. But for small teams, or as I have seen at many organizations just a single person, cron works great. So what is cron exactly? From a user perspective it is a text file, crontab, that holds instructions for the cron daemon. The instructions consist of a command and the time to run that command. Below is the format and an example:  * *...

MLS Player Salaries 2018 Every year the MLS Players Association releases player salaries by team, you can check them out here,  MLSPA Salary Page . A couple things stand out. Spending money doesn't mean you are going to be good. the top 3 teams by salary did not make the playoffs this year. And it's good to be a Forward Now the MLS salary cap rules are a bit odd. Here is an article from last year that gives some explanation. Here are the top 20 players by total compensation. Toronto, Chicago and LA Galaxy have some work to do clearing out those top end salaries because they are not translating to results on the field.