It’s not you, it’s PowerPoint

PowerPoint is so despised that “death by PowerPoint” has become a common expression. It might be more literal than you think given its role in the explosion of the Columbia shuttle and its negative impact on the conduct of war. Even the creators of PowerPoint don’t like how it’s used today. Yet PowerPoint has its […]

MOOC Week 2: The politics of words

While I’m working on the assignment for weeks 5 and 6 of the MOOC, let’s have a look back at week 2. We were asked to provide a critique of a graph about the words used by speakers at the Republican and Democratic conventions for the 2012 election. As with most of what the New […]

Quote of the day

This one is on my wall at the office. Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information, they are failures of design. Edward Tufte, Windows Phone 7 Series

All aboard the MOOC

When I first heard of the massive online open course on data visualization at the Knight Center of the University of Texas, it seemed the term had been invented for this class. I realized I was wrong when I saw the article in the New York Times: The Year of the MOOC and the Washington […]