525 historians and political science scholars got together and ranked all the Presidents. It sounds like the ultimate bar game for U.S. history professors. They releases their results recently here As per usual, the report does no favors for the casual reader who might want to explore this data. So I put together an interactive app (open in a new window) This is the beauty of Juicebox: if only one of those 500+ academics had asked, I could have given them a 10x better way to present their data before they released their PDF ..read more

Which Chatbot is the best? Check out our interactive app below: ? Which organizations are taking the lead with their Chatbot models? ? How are Chatbots improving over time? ? Which University has created a top 5 Chatbot? Share the app The data is sourced from the Large Model Systems Leaderboard (https://lnkd.in/gvDSKSN9), "a crowdsourced open platform for LLM evals. We've collected over 200,000 human preference votes to rank LLMs with the Elo ranking system ..read more

Change does not happen in straight line. And we do a disservice when we thinking about “data driven decisions” as a simple sequence of events: gather data —> do analysis —> find insights —> present insights —> action Let’s take a few examples from outside the world of analytics: 1. In 1969, a community of Native Americans protested on the island of Alcatraz in the San Francisco bay. For 19 months, they occupied the island, demanding the return of the land. In the end, the protest fizzled and their demands were reject. However, their efforts were not ultimately without change. In ..read more

I've been writing about data storytelling for a decade. The concept has grown in popularity; the underlying concepts haven't changed much. Most courses or books will emphasize the same core concepts: focus on your audience, set up the conflict, lead your reader to resolution and action, use visualizations to deliver your messages. These are good things if you want to convey a message with data. But if we were to put Data Storytelling on the Gartner hype curve, it would sit somewhere beyond the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" and far short of the "Plateau of Productivity." People love Data S ..read more

We know that ChatGPT is remarkable at generating text. It is also a powerful tool for summarizing text. It can compress a long article down to the CliffsNotes version in an instant. How does it do with data? With some prompting guidance, I was able to teach ChatGPT an approach for summarizing a data table. Understanding what you are working with in data is often the first step before diving into analysis. I was impressed with the results once I walked ChatGPT through my general thought process. I started with this prompt: Step 1. Describe what each row in the data set represents. Knowing wha ..read more

The The New York Times recently published a story: “Defending Its Rankings, U.S. News Takes Aim at Top Law Schools” (paywalled) about how Law Schools are fed up with the US News & World Report rankings, and how the magazine is fighting back. I was particularly struck by this passage: Ms. Gerken, the Yale Law School dean, and other participants suggested that the data gathered by the American Bar Association already provided good information for prospective applicants. The data provided on the bar association website, however, does not allow someone to easily compare one law scho ..read more

“Endings are hard” is the subject of a recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. He shares a live stage with comedian Mike Birbiglia, an extremely accomplished storyteller in his own right. Together they bemoan the inadequacy of many story endings. Gladwell compares how we evaluate people and how we evaluate stories. Unlike our snap judgements about people, …our evaluation of stories is the opposite. It's back loaded. What happens in the last five minutes colors every conclusion we drew in the first two hours. I will guarantee you that every screenwriter and author an ..read more

Meet Jamie Beason. She is the Senior Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics at JLL, a global professional services company specializing in real estate and investment management. Jamie has built an analytics team with a thoroughness and thoughtfulness that I’ve rarely seen. If you are in the position of creating your own analytics team—or even if you are an analytics team of one—her approach is a blueprint worth emulating. Jamie is also modest. What she’s done in her role at JLL is impressive and I wanted to help share some lessons from her analytics team-building approach. Jamie’s Da ..read more

The “Last Mile of Analytics” is riddled with potholes. It is a surprisingly challenging journey to go from data analysis to influencing and changing minds. One of the biggest of potholes on this journey is the available attention of your audience. We hear the same things over and over: My audience won’t open the report that I sent, even though I worked hard to make it easy to read. My customers don’t take the time to sign in to our analytics tool. I have many audiences with many different ways they want to see the data. Some want all the details; others just want to be told what is most impor ..read more

You know that moment when you uncover something refreshingly new in data? It is that “wow” or “aha!” when the obvious emerges from confusion, when a messy world gives way to clarity. These moments are not dissimilar from the flashes of insight we enjoy from stand-up comics. Check out the following short video from Bill Burr on the Conan show. In about two minutes, he drops (by my count) six comic insights that reframe how you might think about Lance Armstrong. These delightful moments of data insight are the sweet reward in the analytics world. Whether you are a researcher, consultant, data an ..read more