Chandoo has posted the new Microsoft Ads in Microsoft says ‘I am PC’ and it is brilliant. Contrary to my expectations, especially after the abortive Bill and Jerry spots, I enjoyed these ads. Microsoft finally has countered those insipid Mac vs. PC ads (see review in Slate), in a tasteful and clever way. Hey, I [...]

In Graphical Approach to a Simple Physics Problem I discussed my daughter’s physics homework. The problem was to determine the relationships between how long it takes water to drain from a hole in the bottom of a bucket, the diameter of this hole, and the initial height of water in the bucket. The data is [...]

Several years ago I helped someone who was having trouble with a fitted trendline in an Excel chart. I saved the example, because I knew I’d have a blog someday, and I’d need a topic. I will use this example to describe a number of errors people encounter when fitting data. The errors are listed [...]

In Can You Improve this Graph Showing Suicide Rates in Japan?, Nathan of FlowingData shows a chart of long-term unemployment rates and suicide rates in Japan. The chart comes from Suicide Epidemic in Japan. What’s wrong with this chart (which I’ve reproduced below)? Axis label is faulty. “Japan and Suicide Rate” should be “Japan Long [...]

In my last post, Moving Averages, I made a bold comment that seasonally adjusted economic quantities used to intrigue me until I learned that they are merely moving averages. I said this only semi-seriously, and Rick Williams commented that seasonally adjusted averages really are seasonally adjusted, taking into account day of the week, month of [...]

When I was a kid, I remember hearing of seasonally-adjusted economic indicators. I was rather disappointed to learn, upon growing up and taking econ, that seasonally-adjusted economic indicators were not calculated using some highly theoretical formulas taking into account all manners of variation, but were merely moving averages. In Highlight Certain Time Periods in a [...]