With all that email that piles in for vi*gra and unlucky Nigerian princes, we assume that someone, somewhere, makes tons of money on it all. But some stealthy University of California researchers at Berkeley and San Diego concluded that spammers may be easier to thwart than we thought.
Archives for September 2009
Visual analysis is pragmatic, not just “pretty”
So many of us who feel drawn to visual analysis can’t understand why everyone can’t see the value. “Pretty pictures,” the skeptics mutter. On Eager Eyes, Robert Kosara makes important points that I haven’t seen before.
Toward the end of his post he writes, “We need a new term.” He rejects the aged and indefinite “visualization” and the baggage-laden “visual analytics.” He prefers “visual analysis.”
Whatever we call it, it’s harder to use than it seems.
… Read the rest “Visual analysis is pragmatic, not just “pretty””You have seen the bar and pie charts, but do you actually know what they mean? Do you know how to use them to tease the relevant information out of your data?
BI buying decisions: the rule of thumb
A longtime salesperson of BI products says the average decision to buy relies on these factors:
• About 50 percent of the decision — whether to buy any BI at all or which product to buy — is based on expected ROI. This part always comes first.
• About 20 percent is about career. Someone — usually an IT person — figures, “Even if it’s a bomb and I get laid off, I can say I know Cognos/Microstrategy/Oracle/SAS …” Or else the person figures, “This looks like the next cool thing, and I could be on the ground floor.”
• The last 30 percent is about sex or fear — that is, some sexy feature or fear of implementation.… Read the rest “BI buying decisions: the rule of thumb”