plotting – Just Another Datapoint http://williamratcliff.com a random walk through my thoughts... Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:51:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6 Today I learned a new word: Ultracrepidarianism http://williamratcliff.com/plot-ly/ http://williamratcliff.com/plot-ly/#respond Fri, 06 Nov 2020 22:58:00 +0000 http://williamratcliff.com/blog/?p=59 I was listening to No Stupid Questions and it was fascinating. In it, they introduce the word, “ultracrepidarianism”, which according to Wikipedia is “the giving of opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge”. Some of you may be familiar with Dunning and Kruger. Delving a bit more into research by Dunning, when we first start to learn something, we can realize that we are not experts—but as we begin to learn a little, we become deluded into believing that we are. This can be rather dangerous—especially for those of us who do cross-disciplinary work. This is basically a reminder for myself to be cautious. I will close with their reference to a poem:

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1711

]]> http://williamratcliff.com/plot-ly/feed/ 0 Getting started with D3 http://williamratcliff.com/getting-started-with-d3/ http://williamratcliff.com/getting-started-with-d3/#respond Mon, 03 Sep 2012 21:15:30 +0000 http://williamratcliff.com/blog/?p=19 As we move more to the web for showing data, there is a need for good plotting libraries.   We started using flot and eventually migrated to JQPlot which I’ve been fairly happy with for general plotting.  Lately, I’ve been hearing about D3 for more custom plots and thought I’d take a bit of time to learn more about it this weekend.

I just had a quick read of Getting Started with D3 by Mike Dewar.   I saw an excellent talk by the author (who works at bit.ly) related to data analysis.   Sadly, I wasn’t terribly happy with the book.   Part of it is that the book is just incredibly short!   The idea of taking MTA data to look at was good, but somehow I think more examples could have been shown, or perhaps some more involved visualizations/interactions.   After reading the book, I have a basic feeling for some of what D3 can do, but am not sure if I could have learned the same information from simply looking through the web…Some introduction to SVG would have been rather helpful.

I may play with it a bit later for a few custom visualizations and see whether it is worthwhile…From the book, and the examples that I’ve seen, it is useful when you’re wanting to do non-standard plots, otherwise, I think I’ll stick with jqplot.

]]> http://williamratcliff.com/getting-started-with-d3/feed/ 0