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Tufte is God

What's very interesting about this book is that the printers of the day decided to take Newton's nice illustrations and print them on a new embossing press. However, the pages had to ben run through the plain type press first, then the embosser. Four hundred years ago, this was the bleeding edge of technology and his illustrations wouldn't line up with the text.

So instead they printed the first 80 pages or so of pure text with footnotes, and at the end of the book added a section of large fold-out pages for the embossed diagrams. In addition to having to learn calculus while reading the book, looking up each diagram in an appendix must've made for some maddening reading material!

Mr. Tufte's point was that people who create data displays shouldn't let anyone screw with it. If they did it to Newton, they'll do it to anyone.

By the way, the colophon includes the printer's name in color (the only place color is used in the book), but doesn't even have Newton's name on it!

Anyway, that's a little info about the book.

Actually, it was more a case of bad presentation skills. Check out Edward Tufte's "Visual Explanations" for a complete rundown, but basically, IIRC, one guy (or group) knew of the danger and spoke up about it. His supervisors said "Okay, write me a report detailing excactly why we should delay the launch." He did, and it was a very confusing report. So they went on with it, and, well, you know the rest.

Edward Tufte has an interesting discussion of this case (how the scientists could have presented the evidence better) in Visual Explanations .

If you read the book, he seems to be laying most of the fault at the feet of the engineers who prepared such an unconvincing presentation for NASA. In a class I took with him, however, he talked about how people making a serious decision have an obligation to make sure they are getting the information they need -- that NASA should have pressed for more information. The questions he feels the recipients of a presentation should ask are, "Show me causality," "Show me all relevant data," and "What do I really need to know?"

I asked him about this apparent shift afterwards and he said, well, there was certainly enough blame to go around. [NOTE: previous two paragraphs lifted from a comment I made on another site].

- adam

There's a cool map of Nappy's march into Russia, which shows, visually, the losses suffered by the thickness of the line, among other things. Really beautifully rendered. Edward Tutfe (master of information design) is a big fan of it, understandably so.

But, on the other hand, I haven't bought a book or CD new in the past 4 years or so. This is in protest of the collaboration and price fixing between publishers. I figure if they try to screw me, I'll find a legal way that hurts them in the pockets. So the ban on direct linkage, while it may appear to be a good idea for the authors, will only hurt the effectiveness of their site. I'll just end up going to half.com or Amazon anyway, and ignore their site completely.

Anyway, if the authors want more money/any money at all from used book sales, they should publish themselves, because the large publishing houses would hardly like to share a new source of income. I'd be glad to buy a book new even if it did cost a little more from an author who publishes independently a la Edward Tufte.

If the future book lends itself to self-publishing, why not?

The most successful self-publisher I know about is Edward Tufte. He has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his three books. There is an interview in which he tells why and how he self-published.

An excerpt from that interview follows:

It turned out that all self-publishing required was a really good book designer, some money, and a large garage. For capital, I took out another mortgage on my house. This also concentrated my mind, in part because interest rates were 18% at the time. The bank officer said this was the second most unusual loan that she had ever made; first place belonged to a loan to a circus to buy an elephant!

My view on self-publishing was to go all out, to make the best and most elegant and wonderful book possible, without compromise. Otherwise, why do it? If I wanted to mess it up, I could have gone to a real publisher. And I also wanted a reasonable price so that the book would be widely accessible. It all worked out, dreamlike

If you haven't seen him speak, he gives a great one day seminar on visualization and display. The schedule is available at his homepage.

He's a very good speaker, and while the content is basically a survey of his four books, the presentation is lively and his style is very engaging. IMHO, this was a bargain for the price, and a very worthwhile event.

The problem with this is that while I was attending school, it would have been Visual C++, Visual Basic, Access, and .BAT file programming.

Perl? Java? Unix? Nah. Why bother? Business has declared that Microsoft is the winner!

(And as far as I am concerned, "Working knowledge of C++" is "C++ sucks big rocks thru small straws")

SQL isn't hard, in the basics, but it is tricky to do the fancy stuff well. So yeah, SQL. But HTML? In a _CS_ curriculum? You must be kidding.

Far better to have 'em take a data visualization course, perhaps based on something by Edward Tufte.

Anyone interested in the Challenger failure and the debate between the engineers at Morton Thiokole and NASA, there is an excellent treatment in Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte. Chapter 2 deals with the Challenger and explains how and why the people at Thiokol, who knew the O-ring would fail, were unable to convince the people at NASA through a series of confusing charts and misinformation.

"What you don't seem to realize is that HCI studies are all a complete load of bollocks; HCI is the "social policy" of Computer Science. (Thinking in degree terms). "

Well... perhaps the studies that you describe - but in the course of researching the software my company is developing I have read a number of serious HCI research papers and dissertations. The really good researchers observe real users in their REAL environments.

This research then looks a many different environments, for example multiple large corporate environments as well as other large scale computer users such as government labs. In observing how different groups solve the same basic set of tasks using different software products the researchers can learn a great deal about the influence of user interface and other design decisions on actual real use, productivity, and effect (and well as effectiveness) of software packages.

From this research it seems generally accepted that around 80% of ALL users of ALL computer software do not change the defaults - so the defaults that a software company or corporation sets for the software they use or sell is critical.

For the one of the specific researchers I am speaking of look at her website at: Leysia Palen Home Page.

For perhaps the best researcher on presenting information, look at: The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press

Definitely a good book. Got it right next to the original Nielsen book, the O'Reilly Information Architecture and Web Navigation books, and the Lynch and Horton Yale Web Style Guide. Add to that the book I am reading now (see post below). I also have heard good things about the Tufte Books but haven't read them yet.