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Thanksgiving Dinner Weighing Heavily on Your Mind? Here's a Light-hearted Look (Literally)
Thanksgiving is just 2 days away and kicks off a whole season of eating. And it's easy to rationalize the high calorie content of my favorite foods because the facts are just numbers floating around in my head.
I know that pictures are easier to recall so I thought a few analytical visualizations would stay in mind as I fill my plate. So I decided to do a little data visualization with Tableau Desktop of the typical Thanksgiving dinner replete with images of turkeys, brussel sprouts and pumpkin pie. I grabbed all the ingredients for dinner favorites, put them into a spreadsheet and started visually analyzing caloric and nutritional content. And because the economy is in such peril, I added in ingredient costs too. While nothing surprised me, seeing it in pictures really puts it in perspective.
Looking at the first scatter view below, the first thing I noticed was that the salad you often find on Thanksgiving dinner tables is not as innocent as you'd think. It's second only to pumpkin pie with whipped cream in terms of calories. And it's also one of the higher cost items. O.k., so the fact that there's cheese and nuts sprinkled throughout along with a fat-rich dressing should have made both of these conclusions obvious. Nonetheless, even though you think "salad" and thus "load up", you should think "what am I putting on this lettuce!".
It's also worth noting that there are some clear winners in terms of low calorie and low cost tasty items: gravy (at least the way I make it), cranberry sauce and brussel sprouts. Not really a meal on their own but definitely worth including for variety. And don't forget the turkey! While it by far is the most expensive item, it's also pretty healthy.
Another option is to turn to foods that are fiber-rich and low(er)-calorie. The fiber will make you feel full faster and longer. The scatter view below shows two decent alternatives: mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Personally, I've never had green bean casserole but I may just give it a try this year. And who doesn't love mashed potatoes?
Two other options if you modify them slightly right there at the table: 1) the fancy salad if you avoid the nuts, cheese and dressing and 2) pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie is a pretty fiber-rich food but unfortunately, that whipped cream makes it high calories. So scrape that off and you can add it to your list of "gorge" foods.
Well, so will I be more conscientious at the dinner table now that I've visualized my Thanksgiving Dinner? (And even though I've basically rationalized every item except stuffing)? Actually, I think I will. And I hope you will be too!
By the way, if you're interested in doing your own data visualizations of your Thanksgiving Dinner, please feel free to use my Tableau Packaged Workbook with Tableau Desktop as a start. Or use Tableau Reader to see all the visualizations I did of my dinner.
Titanic Data Analysis - Did Passengers Get Their Money's Worth?
You may have read about the City of Charlotte's "Business Analysis Olympiad" where 12 teams of analysts from across the city departments competed in an analytical showdown. It was quite the event and Jock Mackinlay's blog post gives all the details. Data Administration Specialist Doris Phillips had the original idea to hold the Business Analysis Olympiad. And it was James Raper, Manager of Data Administration, who made the most of the suggestion and orchestrated the event.
Several weeks ago well before the Olympiad, Doris took the first crack at analyzing data about Titanic passengers. She shared her visual analysis with both the Oracle Developer Tools Users Group (ODTUG) and with us at Tableau. And were we knocked out by her work. Titanic buffs will of course enjoy this (there are a lot of people who study the Titanic story - and I don't mean the movie). But even if you don't have much of an interest in the fate of the Titanic, you'll still be fascinated by her visualization work.
It's not that the results are all that surprising - and it confirms what you may already think. That people who paid more for tickets tended to survive. Doris also shows that people in higher fare class tickets tended to survive and that females tended to survive over their male counterparts.
What's so cool is the way Doris was able to show these patterns so clearly on her dashboard. It's clean, clear and elegant. And she also made it easy to ask additional questions through the use of quick-filters. If you have Tableau Reader (a free application), you can interact directly with Doris' work and filter through class patterns, gender patterns and even embarcation location patterns. You can get Doris' packaged workbook here.
But if you have Tableau Desktop (even a free trial of Desktop), you can create new visualizations of the data. I couldn't help myself. I went for something simple - I looked at gender by fare class using Tableau's new pie charts. The pattern practically jumps off the page. You can't help but see that there is chivalry at work (i.e., women and children first). Just 19% of men survived while nearly 73% of women survived. Not suprisingly, the higher the fare class, the better the survival rate across gender.
So thank you, Doris, for sharing your work with us. We really enjoyed it. And I hope you Titanic buffs out there enjoy it too.
City of Charlotte Wows Us with Innovative "Business Analysis Olympiad"
I just returned from one of the most interesting and innovative business events I've ever attended. The City of Charlotte sponsored a "Business Analysis Olympiad" to promote the business value of visual data analysis software as well as to create a community of visual analysts within the city’s key businesses. When employees use data and information more effectively, they make better business decisions and thus serve the citizens of Charlotte better.
The contest was created by the Business Systems Support group in the IT department and attracted teams from across the city’s 14 departments to learn about the new ways that they could visualize and analyze data. In other words, IT functioned as a pro-active consultant to business units to improve their present practices.
The data set for the contest involved the sinking of the Titanic, the origin of the passengers and their fares. 12 teams of 2 persons each used Tableau to analyze this data set and present their findings. These teams included the Department of Transportation, Charlotte Area Transit System, Charlotte Fire Department (they had fans that came to support them), Economic Development Office, Engineering & Property Management, Planning, and Solid Waste Services.
After working with Tableau and the Titanic data for about 1 week, each team had exactly 5 minutes to present their findings. All teams did a great job and many of the teams had impressive presentations given the limited time they had with the product and data set. We saw sheet linking, business dashboards, scatter charts, stacked bars, pyramids, various time series, integrated mapping, imported moving visuals across the ocean, summary tables, pie charts, tabular, annotations, good use of color, data labels, trend lines, bar in a bar, Gantt charts and table calculations. The city is a huge user of GIS and many of the teams took to our mapping capabilities in a NY minute.
Professor Robert Kosara of the UNC at Charlotte, Julie Burch, Assistant City Manager, and I were the judges. Choosing the winners was a challenge but after a detailed discussion we made the following choices:
- First Place -- "Trash Talkers" from Solid Waste Services. The analysts were Kimberly Jenkins and James Gray with Michelle Moore as their sponsor.
- Second Place -- "Research Methods" from Planning. The analysts were Ruchi Agarwai and Evan Lowry with Steve Patterson as their sponsor.
- Third Place -- "Quality CATS" from Charlotte Area Transit System. Analysts were Celia Gray and Shelly McKee with Cilia Gray as their sponsor.
The first place team, Trash Talkers, did an excellent job of using Tableau to tell stories with the data. They showed that there was significant empty space in some of the lifeboats. They also used an overlapping bar chart to clearly show that it was better to be a first or second class female than a third class male. Below is one of their visualizations. Also, you can download their packaged workbook (which can be viewed with either Tableau Desktop or free Tableau Reader).
Second place went to Research Methods. Here is one of their dashboards. Also, you can download their packaged workbook part A or part B (both of which can be viewed with either Tableau Desktop or free Tableau Reader).
Third place went to Quality CATS. Here is one of their dashboards. Also, you can download their packaged workbook (which can be viewed with either Tableau Desktop or free Tableau Reader).
Congratulations not only to the winners and the participants but also to Jim Raper and his Business Systems Support group for putting on such a creative, fun and educational data visualization event. With this kind of thoughtfulness, creativity and innovation, it's no wonder that City of Charlotte has been named a best place to live numerous times.
Prestigious Computing Publication Honors Tableau Founders' Original Research
Tableau Software was recently honored by the computer science publication, Communications of the ACM (CACM). 50,000+ members of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) just received the November issue featuring a research paper by Chris Stolte, Diane Tang and Pat Hanrahan. Titled "Polaris: A System for Query,
Analysis, and Visualization of Multidimensional Databases", it's about their invention Polaris, now called VizQL, the founding technology under Tableau Software. It also includes a foreword by Jim Gray, a pioneer, legend and brilliant mind in computer science. Jim Gray’s name may sound familiar; he’s the computer scientist who unfortunately went missing off the San Francisco Bay 2 years ago. Pat Hanrahan's recent blog entry describes how important Jim was to his and Chris's research.
It's quite an honor to be associated with Jim Gray's work. It's also an honor to be 1 of the 2-3 research papers featured in the monthly CACM. The ACM membership is large and includes computer science's smartest researchers and professionals. There are thousands of papers published every year that could qualify but only a very few actually make it into the pages of the CACM.
But besides the recognition that this brings Chris, Pat and Tableau, both pieces are really useful. The research paper itself explains the Polaris/VizQL invention in clear and detailed language. I also really like Jim's article. In one page, Jim's thoughtful article describes eloquently why Polaris (aka VizQL) is so important. He says:
"If you have ever been frustrated when trying to plot a useful graph from a simple spreadsheet, you would appreciate the value of a system that allows users to create stunning graphs interactively and easily from large multidimensional datasets. Stolte, Tang, and Hanrahan have done that with Polaris, a declarative visual query language that unifies the strengths of visualization and database communities."
He points out the three advances the authors make in parallel:
1) They show how to automatically construct virtually any type of graph, chart, map, or timeline as table visualizations in one unified approach. By having one unified approach, it makes it easy to switch from one representation to another or to add dimensions. If you're a Tableau user, you already know how easy it is to change views or add dimensions.
2) They also unified the graphical language with the SQL query languages so that a single “program” specifies both data retrieval and data presentation. This is important for speed and performance.
3) They developed a GUI that “writes” the visual queries as you drag and drop dimensions or measurements in a data viewer. This combination makes it simple for users to ask “what if” questions for large multidimensional datasets without having to know the mechanics of querying or graphing. If you've used Tableau, you already know how intuitive and easy to use it is.
Jim's foreword also has a beautiful example of actual VizQL code and the resulting image (see above).
Honoring and Honored by Jim Gray in November's Communications of the ACM Magazine
About ten years ago I was attending a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences with Jim Gray; one of our most brilliant minds in computer science, a Turing Award winner, and a legendary figure in the field of databases. Jim is a warm and open person, so I seized on the opportunity to get his input on some ideas I was exploring on how to improve people's tools for accessing and analyzing data.
First I asked him what he thought were the most widely used ways to interactively access databases. He immediately answered that there were two common ways: form-based interfaces (such as Query-By-Example which is used in Microsoft's Access) and Excel Pivot Tables. He agreed that people need better tools, and we then spent a good hour brainstorming about better ways to interactively analyze and visualize data. That conversation started Chris Stolte and me on the journey that lead to Tableau Software.
A couple of weeks later we had come up with two ideas. The first was that pivot tables could be generalized to produce a wide variety of graphical displays, not just tables of numbers. The second was that in the process of composing the display, the user could also formulate a query. Chris, Diane Tang and I developed a prototype which we called Polaris, and soon thereafter we published a paper on the ideas behind the system.
The original paper was published in 2001. Last week, the paper was republished in the Research Highlights section of the Communications of the ACM.
It is great honor to have our work selected to appear in CACM, but an even greater honor to have our paper recommended by Jim Gray, and to have the perspective on the paper written by Jim (with posthumous help from David Patterson of Berkeley). It is even a greater honor to appear in an issue dedicated to Jim. Many of you probably followed the story of his disappearance, the incredible search that followed, and the recent articles and symposium to honor him. We all loved Jim, and miss his encouragement and leadership every day. We probably would not have developed Tableau, if not for that fortunate meeting many years ago. Jim's influence and memory lives on.
