Introducing
Visualization designer, author, teacher, and consultant
Alberto Cairo is a journalist and designer, and the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami (UM). He is also the director of the visualization program at UM’s Center for Computational Science. He has been head of information graphics at media publications in Spain and Brazil.
The author of several textbooks, Cairo currently consults with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office and has provided visualization training to the European Union, Eurostat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Army National Guard, and many others. He lives in Miami, Florida.
Read more about Alberto Cairo
Read a long-form profile at Microsoft News
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COVID-19 and How Charts Lie
with Alberto Cairo
The Corona Virus being discussed across the world, with all the visualizations there, it is timely that I am speaking with Alberto Cairo. He is a visualization guru and has written the book “How Charts Lie”. This book helps you as a statistician to understand various problems about charts, but more importantly, it helps you to educate your business partners that are not statisticians.
We also discuss the following points:
- How tables compare to charts in terms of “lying”
- How to strike the best balance between showing the details and overwhelming the audience
- What behaviors or habits should we develop to improve our visualizations
References:
Michael Friendly’s Golden Age of Visualization paper
Eurostat’s Power from Statistics about Uncertainty,
The story about the “New Golden Age”
Tools:
Books:
Show Me the Numbers
Storytelling Data Visualization Business Professionals
Truthful Art Data Charts Communication
Elements Graphing Data William Cleveland
Visual Display Quantitative Information
Exploratory Data Analysis John Tukey
Join The Effective Statistician LinkedIn group
This group was set up to help each other to become more effective statisticians. We’ll run challenges in this group, e.g. around writing abstracts for conferences or other projects. I’ll also post into this group further content.
I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.
When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.
When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.
When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.
I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.
Let’s work together to achieve this.
