noahmarc

It's been a few years since I last read it but Menger's take was the first I've ever read that just makes sense: https://mises.org/sites/default/files/On%20the%20Origins%20o... (1892)

Not a dumb question at all. I left my Tufte books at the office, so I can't check, but I thought he cited sources throughout.

Either way, between Cleveland, Robins, Few, and Ware there're tons of studies and references:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/wsc/index.html

http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/2028337238_Naomi_B_Ro...

http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php

http://www.amazon.ca/Visual-Thinking-Design-Colin-Ware/dp/01...

Better is subjective though and related to what you're trying to do. A lot of past research was about efficiency of information transfer. There's more recent research looking at memorability. In one report, different graphics could have both goals.

There's a "Useful Junk" paper delving into that topic. There's a link to it in Few's reply: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...

There's plenty more. Stanford Vis group is a fun place to check from time to time: http://vis.stanford.edu/ Heer specifically has a range of papers and some online slides for a vis course he taught http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/ (uses Tufte for the course text)

I'm drawing a blank on a few others I find informative...

Unfortunately, I don't have any about fonts but I'm sure there are plenty out there.

For someone with a programming background, this is one of the best introductions I've seen: http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2623621262001

Thanks for joining the discussion. Just want to say I'm working through the the videos for your coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) and, in addition to being a great introduction to Scala, it's changing how I approach other functional languages like JavaScript and R

Seems like they would alienate enterprise clients but free certainly sounds appealing for small shops.

Definitely, thank you for the offer. I'm running through the install now but will send you an email once I've run a couple tests. I see your contact info is listed on your home page.

The Relite mention at the end looks very worthwhile. We were just about to begin a large rewrite of analysis code from R to CUDA; Relite has the potential to save the effort of rewriting our existing code.

This seems like a great bundle of courses. The big data topics caught my attention but I'm actually looking forward to exploratory data analysis. Especially with the Tukey mention: https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651

Sounds like a market opportunity. Aside from simple accounting (tracking revenue and expenses), what's the range of startup needs that are covered by Excel?

If these needs aren't met by current accounting / finance packages, it definitely opens the door for a new competitor.

I wouldn't mind taking a closer look at that. They do have a data API to store individual key value pairs http://snapsvg.io/docs/#Element.data

Definitely different than what I'm used to in D3js, but worst case scenario you would have to loop through each key value pair. Worth testing out.