Bad Graphics, STEM Diversity Edition

There was a article in Scientific American about diversity in STEM collecting together the best demographic data available about the science and engineering workforce. It’s a useful collection of references, and comes with some very pretty graphics, particularly this one, showing the demographic breakdown of the US population compared to the science and engineering fields: […]

Medium, Message, and Secondary Audiences in Public Speaking

Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff– more images, less text, don’t read your slides, and for God’s sake, rehearse […]

Great Moments in Puzzling Axis Labels

While I’m complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum’s recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the “featured image” above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don’t dispute the general phenomenon this is describing– that the top 10% of college […]

The Visual Presentation of Misleading Information, Anti-Asian Bias Edition

In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz’s epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed. ———— Steve Hsu has a new post on a favorite topic of his, bias against Asians in higher ed admissions. This is based on a […]

How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012

My timekeeping course this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar,” which means it’s supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt […]