Data Presentation
Category archives for Data Presentation
The Visual Presentation of Misleading Information, Anti-Asian Bias Edition
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 28, 2012 
In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz’s epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed. ———— Steve Hsu has a new post on a favorite topic of his, bias against Asians in higher ed admissions. This is based on a…
How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 5, 2012 My timekeeping course this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar,” which means it’s supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt…
How to Present Scientific Data
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 19, 2012 In the same basic vein as last week’s How to Read a Scientific Paper, here’s a kind of online draft of the class I’m going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. “Present” here meaning the more general “display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or…
Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 24, 2011 The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of…
Do You Really Need a Graph for That?
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 23, 2011 As long as I’m picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with– they found that…
Great Moments in Deceptive Graphs
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 10, 2011 This morning, via Twitter, I ran across one of the most spectacular examples of deceptive data presentation that I’ve ever seen. The graph in question is reproduced in this blog post by Bryan Caplan, and comes from this econ paper about benefits of education. The plot looks like this: This is one panel clipped out…
The Second Lives of Academic Posters
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 2, 2011 This morning’s Links Dump included a post from Mad Mike and an entire blog on improving academic posters. For those not in the sciences, one of the traditional means of communicating research results is at a poster session where tens to hundreds of researcher each prepare a poster (usually 3′x5′ or thereabouts) about their project,…
“Line Plot” is Never the Right Choice (Why Excel Sucks, aleph-nought in a series)
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 19, 2010 There have been a bunch of interesting things written about education recently that I’ve been too busy teaching to comment on. I was pulling them together this morning to do a sort of themed links dump, when the plot at the right, from Kevin Drum’s post about school testing jumped out at me. This shows…
Bad and Good Presentation Graphs
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 29, 2010 I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students’ first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same…
Scientific Salary Stratigraphy: Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 25, 2010 Inside Higher Ed has a news squib about gender disparities in academic science, which points to a Nature story about a survey on job satisfaction (bad IHE, giving a false impression on the story!). The gender portion of the story is limited to a short section at the end of the article, and one graph:…
