
Methods of Comparison, Compared: A Visual Guide to Comparing Change - jashkenas
https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/methods-of-comparison-compared
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kjeetgill
Fantastic piece. I love the systematic approach to refine my intuitions. Not
just how to reason about statistics, but how to effectively second guess
myself. And the visualisations really help to reflect on that.

Side note: I thought the visuals we're too impressive, turns out it's written
by Mike Bostock of d3.js and bl.ocks.org/mbostock fame. His article
"Visualizing Algorithms"[0] is a must read.

[0]:
[https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/](https://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/)

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apendleton
Observable, the notebook platform hosting the piece, is his (along with Jeremy
Ashkenas who posted this to HN, and Tom MacWright) new startup, and I think
this post is meant in part to demonstrate its capabilities.

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jacobolus
And for everyone reading: go play with Observable. It’s fantastic!

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jacobolus
And this doesn’t even discuss the effect of changing the color scale on the
visual appearance (linear vs. log vs. some binning algorithm etc.), measuring
counts per region vs. per capita vs. per square mile, drawing a cartogram,
etc.

There are a _lot_ of choices when displaying data on a map using colors.

Mike & Jeremy: one that you might want to toss in here is normalizing so that
regions matching the national average increase are colored neutrally (instead
of no change being colored neutral). i.e. normalizing relative to the national
trend instead of relative to the previous year’s value. Depending on the data,
this can help separate national vs. regional trends, though it takes more
careful explanation to avoid reader confusion.

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saagarjha
If you take one thing away from this article, hopefully it's this:

> No method is better universally, and none of them is “the best” even in the
> context of the dataset.

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jzl
Ha, I thought this was going to be an article comparing BeyondCompare,
WinMerge, xxdiff, etc..

But it was interesting nonetheless!

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eboyjr
Useful for some politicians.

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stareatgoats
Journalists. I'd say journalists _must_ read this. Maybe every Monday or so.

