All posts by Jesse Weissman

The Wicked Viz

Funnels and Clusters: Vaccine Visualizations

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Data on ways to avoid illness on an airplanes is very welcome this time of year….and good news about vaccines makes me feel even better (assuming people decide to get inoculated). Below are two visualizations from Beautiful News….The funnel graph illustrating reduced mortality rates is one of the more effective I’ve seen, although it’s not entirely clear whether the reduction is 100% attributable to vaccination or other factors. I was also surprised at the effectiveness of the bubble chart. Clustering by vaccine type, and the use of a single color of varying transparency, give a good general sense of which illness is receiving attention and how much relative progress has been made.

Tons of New Vaccines Are in the Pipeline
Millions of lives have been saved by vaccines in the last 25 years
The Wicked Viz

Visualizing Energy Efficiency

Like many in New England, I live in an older home that would benefit from any improvement in energy efficiency. I’ve started to explore the world of solar panels, new windows, insulation and energy audits. And it’s…confusing. The average homeowner now has to contend with different energy efficiency standards on top of an explosion of financial and technical options to choose from.

The Cost of Renewables Is Falling Fast
Replacing All Your Lightbulbs With LEDs Saves Energy and Money

I appreciate the simplicity of these visualizations from Beautiful News. At first, “The Cost of Renewables Is Falling Fast” (top left) made me pause and reach for a book by Tufte. Then I counted all of the little lines and realized that the graph does consistently measure the Y-axis in 1% increments…it just transposes the Y-axis labels where one expects the X-axis, flips expectations about up/down and green/red and positive/negative numbers. This is a visualization that bends “the rules” in support of the visual story.

The second visualization, “Replacing All of Your Lightbulbs with LEDs..” (top right), feels more balanced to me. I appreciate how the cost per year and lifetime data are arranged for easy comparison between the different bulb types. And the benefits of LED are made extraordinarily clear.

The electric company has started to share comparisons of energy consumption in my immediate neighborhood. Using data visualization to raise awareness of energy efficiency may be the missing step connecting homeowners with social programs and financial incentives.

Now let me review my water bill…

Forward Thinkers

Create culture through teaching

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When somebody comes to the analytics team with a request and says, “Hey, I’d like you to run this report,” the analytics team is expected to not just send the report but also teach the person how to run it in the future and make sure that the request doesn’t come in again.

“Building data-driven culture: An interview with ShopRunner CEO Sam Yagan,” McKinsey Quarterly. February 2019