Monday, July 28, 2014

The Game Changes

Here is a fun interactive display by Noah Velltman of the height and weight of National Football League players from 1920 to 2014, via Statistical Modeling... Clicking on this link allows you to vary the year and observe the joint distribution of height and weight over the years. You can even see how the game as changed from the early 1990s as roles and players have become more specialized resulting in distinct clusters of body types.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Adding Economic Noise

Two months ago the New York Times had a very informative visualization of monthly economic data with added variability due to sampling error. In the above screen shot we can see how repeated sampling variability can change a steady job growth graph to many different shapes of what it might have looked like with repeated sampling.
Here is another, an accelerating job growth graph and one possible result of the same graph with sampling variability showing very stable job growth, via Statistical Modeling ... One commenter there notes how easy it is for us to reading meaning into random noise.





Monday, July 14, 2014

States by Letter

Alphabetical distribution of the first letter of US states, via Flowing Data.

Monday, July 7, 2014

YADDA Frank Lloyd Wright

Yet Another Door Distribution Again (YADDA)

We stayed for two nights, this past Fourth of July weekend, in the Haynes House, a Frank Lloyd Wright designed Usonian home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Completed in 1952, it has seen much use. Here is a view of one of a pair of cabinet doors in the master bedroom. It shows the pattern of wear that we have seen often, more in a central area around the door knobs, with less wear extending toward the two extremes, a bell-shaped pattern of wear and use, (Thanks Nick).