Abhinav Agarwal

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Sea World San Diego

From a time long, long ago, from a world far, far away.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

On obscuring information in a chart

Greg Mankiw's blog post, Comparing Recessions, linked to another post, Comparing this recession to the last five, that has a line chart displaying how payroll unemployment fell during the previous five recessions.

The good about the chart is that it makes a direct comparison between the recessions possible because percentages are used instead of absolute figures.

By plotting on the X-axis the length in months instead of using a regular time axis it is possible to have all the series start from the same point, which makes it visually easier to do a comparison of both the steepness of the job losses as well as the length of each recession.

But, this chart has at least a few weaknesses too... and there are ways in someone could improve this, especially visualization vendors.

Firstly, you want to be able to see clearly the job losses that started in Dec 2007. That series is the light blue colored line. Difficult to make out, right? You have to search for it... It is also overwritten in places by the lines of the other series where they overlap.

How can we improve this chart? Several possibilities come to mind.
Before that, I should say I am using some of the best practices in effective information visualization that I read in Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, that I reviewed last month, and also several other books.

I do not have the raw data on which this chart is based, so I used a basic screen capture tool and its flood fill feature to tweak the same chart. Doesn't look pretty, but does get the point across IMO.

Firstly, let's use unsaturated colors for the other series. And a bright saturated color like red for the Dec 2007 series. So now you can see the red series, corresponding to Dec 07, very clearly. It stands out instead of getting obscured by other equally bright colors screaming for attention.

Secondly, we could use a thicker line for the 'Dec 07' series than the rest.

Thirdly, if there are more than five or six series, the chart will quickly start to look very crowded, nor will the series' colors appear different from each other. So, what you could, should, do is use different line styles in addition to the colors. Dotted, dashed and other styles.
Take a look at the example below, that uses random data (yes - it is random, because I used Excel's randbetween() function. Okay, so it is not truly random, but pseudo-random, if you have to nitpick). Even though two series, 1974 and 1980 have the exact same series color, you can tell them apart, right? That's because they use a different type of line style.

Now, if you wanted to put in a little more effort, and thougt, some more ideas spring to mind (well... the phrase really ought to be 'spring from the mind' since they are originating from the mind and not some etherealy ether or orifice).

1. Series dimming / series highlighting / series unselection
If I am interested in, say, the 1991 series, I should be able to click on the series label in the legend, and have the other series dimmed, or entirely hidden, in addition to optionally highlighting the 1991 series.

2. Animation for a selected series.
Dancing monkey animations are not good. However, animation, if well done, helps convey change. As long as it is not too fast as to have the user miss the animation completely, or so slow as to frustrate the heck out of the user, and as long as animation focuses on one thing at a time, it can work well. So what kind of animation am I talking about? Well, one is to be able to animate one series at a time.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Romancing With Life

Romancing With Life by Dev Anand

Format : Hardback
ISBN: 9780670081240
Size : 153 x 234mm
Pages : 448
Published : 28 Aug 2008
Publisher : Viking Adult

Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, and Raj Kapoor, were the first three superstars of Hindi cinema, before there were superstars. Each was born within a couple of years of each other (Dev Anand in 1923, Raj Kapoor in 1924, and Dilip Kumar in 1922), each started his career around the same time (Dev Anand in 1946, Raj Kapoor in 1943, Dilip Kumar in 1946), and while Raj Kapoor died in 1988, and Dilip Kumar has been in retirement for more than a decade (his last movie if I remember was Qila in 1998 or thereabouts), Dev Anand continues to go strong, acting in and directing a movie every few years for over six decades now, the latest one released in 2005. Dev Anand had the screen persona of a dashing, evergreen, ever youthful happy-go-lucky city chap, with a legion of a mostly female fan following. Even in real life he has carried himself with the same elan, and at 85 years is an inspiration for many people.

The book is a celebration of Dev Anand's (Dharam Dev Anand is his full name, as he informs us in the book) life and times, and his romance with life. It proceeds in pretty much a chronological fashion, starting with his childhood and ending with the year 2007, when the last chapter was written. It is written in breezy and mostly frank and honest style. Whether it is his sexual education, on the upper berth of a train, and then while shooting for his first movie, whether his struggles to find a footing in the Hindi movie industry, or his encounters with the censor authorities, or his crush for Zeenat Aman, or his first love with Suraiya, and the heartbreaking end to the affair, or his visit to communist Soviet Union, he comes across as refreshingly honest.

The book is divided into numbered chapters, each small. Sometimes only a couple of pages, but rarely more than 4-5 pages. Each chapter covers a specific episode. So you get one chapter each for Guru Dutt, Kisore Kumar, his brother Vijay Anand, Indira Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi... with a brief reminiscence by Dev.

The language is quite decent in the book, the prose is fairly engaging, perhaps a result of Dev Anand's Lahore Government College education (then one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the country in the then undivided India, pre-Aug 14/15 1947), or maybe Dev Anand got a ghost writer to spruce up the text.

Surprisingly, and refreshingly so, the book has a fairly comprehensive 12 page index, something you would not expect from a movie star's autobio.

However... while the book 400+ page book makes for quick and easy reading, it has shortcomings too.

You will learn nothing of the craft of film making from reading this book. You will learn nothing about the great movies that Dev Anand starred in. Whether Dev Anand's collaboration with the great director and actor and close friend Guru Dutt (Jaal and Baazi), nor the fantastic musical collaboration with SD Burman, nor the immense contributions of Chetan Anand and Vijay Anand (both brothers of Dev Anand) in such movies as 'Tere Ghar Ke Samne', 'Guide', 'Johny Mera Naam', 'Jewel Thief', 'Kala Bazar', 'Nau Do Gyarah'. You have to go through Dev Anand's filmography at the end of the book to realize that Raj Khosla had directed Dev Anand in some past greats like 'Bombai Ka Babu', 'Kala Pani', 'CID', and 'Solva Saal'. What made the great movies that Dev Anand starred in great? Why is it that Dev Anand did not have a single truly commercial or artistically acclaimed hit after he started directing his movies? Consider these truly unremarkable ventures like 'Ishq Ishq Ishq', 'Sau Crore ', 'Awwal Number', 'Gangster', 'Mr Prime Minister', 'Censor', 'Lootmaar' that Dev Anand directed and starred in? What were the lessons that Dev Anand learn from these disasters? Introspection? No. He acknowledges that 'Ishq Ishq Ishq' was one of the biggest disasters of his career. Why? You don't know.

Perhaps the style of his book can be summed up with a line from his movie, Hum Dono: "barbadiyon ka shog manana fizool tha, barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya" (loosely and inarticulately translated as 'lamenting disasters was a waste, I celebrated disasters').

Amazon IN

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Information Dashboard Design

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

4 stars

By Stephen Few
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pub Date: January 24, 2006
Print ISBN-10: 0-596-10016-7
Print ISBN-13: 0-596-10016-7
(Amazon US CA UK, Flipkart)
Stephen Few is a recognized expert in the area of the visual display of business intelligence information.

This book serves as an excellent basic primer on the good principles of displaying information on dashboards, typically business intelligence dashboards, such that information is presented in a clear, understandable manner.

Few expresses strong opinions, so it is likely that some will tend to disagree with his advice, more on emotional than on factual grounds. Especially so if you have been a practitioner in this area. But if you keep your personal/professional biases and dogmas aside, difficult though that may be, this book is an excellent primer on the topic. It is well written, amply illustrated with examples, and at 223 pages, short enough to be read in one go. To truly grasp the effective principles of information dashboard design you would and should go back to the book from time to time to read up on specific sections. And of course, read up on the ample literature that already exists in this area. There are some excellent sites that educate, and several books covering this topic.

Despite everything that's good with this book, there are two shortcomings in my opinion.

The first is its silence on a fairly recent phenomenon, the increasing use of rich interactive visualizations, typically presented via the Flash technology. Good flash visualizations would need to combine not only the basics of information presentation, but also effective use of interactivity and animations, both of which are a common feature with Flash-based visualizations, and also, lamentably, much overused and abused by many vendors. The ability to animate is so often taken as license to go wild with hyperactive animations, with bar graphs that shoot up like sprouts from the x axis, with lines that do a manic jig before settling down, with pie charts that unfurl like some Japanese fan, and more.
The second is the lack of coverage on good design principles for small displays, like the ones found on smartphones like the BlackBerry, iPhone, and others. What works on a traditional 1024x768 sized monitor would not work on a smartphone screen. This area is important for two reasons. The first is that the emergence of the iPhone and its increasing acceptability as a viable enterprise smartphone means that visually rich interfaces can now be rendered on smartphones. This has been possible with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices, but the iPhone brings a whole new dimension in usability. The second is that 3G speeds mean that more content, with more graphics can now be sent over the wire to smartphones, and not be restricted to only SMS-es, or text alerts, or plain vanilla emails.

Possibly, hopefully, these will be addressed in a subsequent edition. Consider that Flash broke into enterprises in a meaningful manner only after 2005/2006, and the iPhone released in 2007, and was opened up to third party developers only in early 2008. So these two lacunae are more sort of inevitable than deliberate.

While not explicitly so, the book is divided into basically three sections. The first section talks about the commonly made mistakes when designing dashboards. Thirteen mistakes are listed, some obvious and most painfully common like "Exceeding the boundaries of a single screen", "Introducing meaningless variety", "Arranging the data poorly", "Choosing a deficient measure", "Highlighting important data ineffectively or not at all", etc... Each listed mistake is described, with one or several illustrative examples from actual dashboards, and with frequent suggested improvements or redesigns of the charts and graphs.

The second part, for my money, is perhaps the most useful section. This section is however only a single chapter - "Tapping Into the Power of Visual Perception", where the cognitive underpinnings of how we perceive and process information are laid out, of how short term memory works, of pre-attentive processing of information and how information can be laid out and formatted such that pre-attentive processing kicks in, which is much faster than attentive, deliberate processing. "In Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Colin Ware suggests that the preattentive attributes of visual perception can be organized into four categories: color, form, spatial position, and motion."

Those familiar with Few's writings will be well aware of his annoyance with pie charts and their uselessness in effectively conveying information. He writes, "The truth is, I never recommend the use of pie charts. The only thing they have going for them is the fact that everybody immediately knows when they see a pie chart that they are seeing parts of a whole (or ought to be). Beyond that, pie charts don't display quantitative data very effectively. As you'll see in Chapter 4, Tapping into the Power of Visual Perception, humans can't compare two-dimensional areas or angles very accurately--and these are the two means that pie charts use to encode quantitative data." ... "Humans tend to underestimate differences in 2-D areas, and hence you must be wary of using 2-D areas of different sizes to encode quantitative values--especially on a dashboard, where speed of interpretation is essential." He suggests that for most purposes bar charts are more effective.

The final three chapters deal with advice and examples of creating effective dashboards. His advice is that "The best way to condense a broad spectrum of information to fit onto a dashboard is in the form of summaries and exceptions", and to "eliminate all unnecessary non-data pixels", and to "de-emphasize and regularize the non-data pixels that remain."

Make no mistake - you are not going to become a pundit in effective dashboard and chart designing after reading this book. But this is an excellent start.

One note: this book lists for Rs 1800 or so on Landmark (www.landmarkonthenet.com), and does not seem to be widely available in India. So, try reading this book online from Safari (www.safaribooksonline.com), or grab a limited preview of the book on Google Books.

Other links:

If this topic interests you, there are many, many more books to peruse:

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Mt St Helens

This photo is of Mt St Helens, taken in November or December 2000. It is one of my favourite photos, and was taken with a Canon A2 film SLR. The striking part of this photo is the snowline, which makes for a very stark contrast with the peak and the higher altitudes, bathed in pristine white snow, and the lower half, barren dried lava. One of the challenges in such photos is deciding on the exposure. Almost any camera's exposuring system is going to be challenged with such a composition. If you expose for the snow, the barren landscape in the bottom half is going to be too dark to make out any details. If you expose for the barren landscape, the snow is going to be too washed out white. If you try something of a compromise, well, nothing's going to be rightly exposed. But, there is NO right exposure. It's all about how you want the photo to come out. One obvious solution is to bracket. If you have a digital camera, you can see the results instantaneously, and adjust the exposure accordingly. Another solution would be to use a one or two-stop neutral density graduated filter such that the snow is darkened enough to retain details in both the snowed region as well as the landscape. Photoshop geeks would also argue that you simply shoot a RAW image, and then process it in Photoshop.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

When is the right time to do layoffs

It seems that the right time, if there ever is a right time, to do layoffs is during an economic boom, when your company and the industry as a whole is going great guns. Counter-intuitive, isn't it? Yes. Because the conventional thinking goes that it is during a downturn that you should do the layoffs, to reduce costs, to become leaner, and to focus. But I propose that layoffs when things are good is better. Think about it. Firstly, it is more humane, because the laid off employees stand a better chance of getting jobs when companies are hiring than when they are not. Second, and this is the delicious part, if you have conducted the layoffs based on some rational and logical process of weeding out the under-performers, then these people, when they do find a job, are likely to head to your competitors, right? That itself has two advantages. First, and this is the obvious one, your competitor with more subpar employees has to be good for you. Second, more subpar employees is going to tick off the super-smart people at your competitors, who will see this addition as proof that the company is heading towards trouble. So, they are more likely to want to look for alternatives. Knowing that **your** company laid off these under-perfomers, and that **their** company hired them is only going to make **your** company look smart. Eh?
But does it work this way? Nah. Of course not. Because boom times are a period of empire building, where quantity trumps quality, and where herd-mentality ensures that companies use the precious currency of an economic boom to squander the opportunity of focusing on and building world class competencies. Also, doing layoffs is considered a sign of trouble. Which hurts the stock price, which doesn't make executives very happy.
Doing layoffs, at any point, is a sure sign of having screwed up - you either hired the wrong people, or you hired more than you needed to - so by doing layoffs when everyone else is also doing so makes your culpability much mitigated, leaving the executives with a very well-preserved sense of self-esteem.

Reading - Jan 16 2009

Miscellaneous readings over the past week or so.

New Yahoo CEO Bartz to receive $1 million salary, 2M bonus, 5M shares on the same day that Autodesk, where Bartz is CEO, announced layoffs Autodesk cuts fourth-quarter forecast, 750 jobs
The End of the Financial World As We Know It refers to a NYT article written by Michael Lewis ('Liar's Poker')
When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
You're boring by Seth Godin, arguing that being boring has a cost...
Economic Distress and Fear
Curiosity, Ignorance, Malice
Allocating Resources: Financial Fraud vs. Terrorism on tradeoffs
Borland to cut workforce by about 15 percent, CEO leaves, joins VMware - who is this worse for? Borland, that it is having to do layoffs AND that its CEO is resigning, or VMWare, that it is getting a possibly under-performer as COO?

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies

The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies, by Jagdish Sheth

You have certainly heard of the 7 habits of highly effective people, the bestseller by Covey, which spawned lots and lots of similar books like the 7 habits of highly effective teens, happy kids, families, and what not. So when you see a cover of a book titled 'The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies', it is sure to catch your attention. And guess what? The habits are seven in number. Just like the seven deadly sins. The author, Jagadish Sheth, lists seven habits that can afflict good companies. If left unchecked, these habits can destroy companies.

Dozens of companies are used as case studies here to highlight these seven 'self-destructing habits'.

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Saturday, January 10, 2009

Amazon Top Books of 2008

The Amazon lists of my interest for 2008:

And some of the books whose titles or subject or reviews caught my attention: