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I found a visual statistics site that offers a great articulation of the value of visual data analysis:
Visual statistics, conceptualized as modern successor of epistemology in search for meaning, can help us to separate facts from fiction, has potential to transcend the schism between the quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis, and, in general, can contribute to the better understanding of our world. It can offer new algorithms for visualization of data structures rotated in the three-dimensional space, provide us with insights into the hyperspace, and much more.
This is a magnificent website. I'm just beginning to realize how many tools are included.
Je download votre software et l'
installe chez mon computer. Par la première vue il fait une impressions
plaisante de une combinassions de mathématiques aride et des effets de chaude
design qui approche de la expression artistique.
Quantification and Visualization of Structural Properties While the primary goal of traditional statistics is to distinguish real differences from random variability, the main goal of visual statistics is not only that, but also the elaboration of these differences into meaningful patterns that can be quantified and visualized. To accomplish this goal, we propose a new conceptualization of variance that encompasses not only the quantification of differences among elements of data matrices into a single index, but also extracts the structural properties of these differences.
Trends
and Timing of the Pax Americana
Gordon Housworth
ICG Capital Group
I make a habit of periodically reviewing my earlier forecasts for accuracy in content and timing, and a determination of which underlying assumptions remain valid and for those that are not, why not. While this can be a bracing exercise, humbling in various respects, it is an invaluable learning experience for content and process, and for restraining ex cathedra pronouncements that imply more solemnity than they deserve. If you fancy yourself a systems thinker or are interested in flagging secondary and tertiary effects, I recommend the process highly. At a minimum, it will drive you from single-loop learning, e.g., asking what could we do better, to double-loop learning, e.g., asking if we are asking the right questions and then asking about better or worse. (If you get that far, you will have exceeded what almost every US corporation does in applied knowledge.)
Still worth reading today is Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000, published in 1987. Kennedy has been criticized for making predictions that "have not fared well over the past decade and more," as things look rather different in 2005. The EU is in disarray while China has surged as has India. A forecast that is not fairing quite as well in my estimation is D'Souza's (2000) The Virtue of Prosperity, which is far more coarse in its criticism of Kennedy ("Never was a book so spectacularly discredited by events.") and is virtually hagiographic in depicting the US as enjoying "unprecedented domination over the political, economic, cultural, and technological life of the world." I think not.
I'll close this note with a highly recommended (and short) War-related deflections of economic trends in which Krus, Nelsen and Webb put at once to shame the fallacy of making linear growth assumptions as it compares and extrapolates three centuries of economic trends of Eastern and Western civilization. Their work is also a good example of mitigation - good for the West and bad for the East - in that the trend convergence following World War I was deflected by World War II, without which the "combined economies of the Far East countries appeared likely to surpass the industrial output of Western countries" by 2010-2020. The mitigation of World War II "delayed the projected intersection of these trends" to the 2040-2050 period, a figure that fits well with other economic forecasts.