- By Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Tait, Decision Mechanics Limited In the late '90s, I had a colleague who was fond of saying, "When an operations analyst encounters a problem, he opens a spreadsheet. Now he has two problems..." Indeed. If you are responsible for a project that has a … [Read more...]
PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid
05/10/2010 By
“PowerPoint makes us stupid." So says Marine Corps General James N. Mattis in a widely shared New York Times article "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint". The General's comments are part of an ongoing debate within the military regarding the efficacy of this ubiquitous presentation … [Read more...]
Do You WolframAlpha?
04/25/2010 By
You probably Google, but do you WolframAlpha? If not, you should and soon. WolframAlpha is an incredibly ambitious project "to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and … [Read more...]
Word Clouds
03/22/2010 By
While data visualization tools are common for numerical analysis, they are less common for linguistic analysis. However, a variety of tools are now available for creating word clouds. Word clouds visually display the words in a passage of text such that each word's visual prominence is proportional … [Read more...]
Solution Webs
03/05/2010 By
Good problem solving requires the exhaustive exploration of all available options. Most of us are not good problem solvers, however. We get lazy, quit too early and select the first solution that adequately meets our criteria. Psychologists call this error in thinking "premature closure." But, as … [Read more...]
