by Walter IsaacsonCopyright (c) 2007. This book, based upon recent public releases of Einstein’s private letters, provides a more intimate portrait of Einstein than has been possible before recent years. Einstein’s prowess as an intellectual and a scholar is well-known. His closest relationships – with his sons, both of his wives, and his daughters – has not been well-known. What do we discover from this in-depth look at the man who helped set the course…
by Stephen Few(c) Copyright 2013. Dashboards are a hot topic in our information-laden world. They are imagined by those in the design world (often very poorly) and implemented by programmers who do not take their imagination any further. This book, written by an acknowledged expert in the field of visualization, describes how to design dashboards that communicate essential data to users, mostly business-people. As such, its audience consists of designers, not programmers. Although I am…
Information Visualization: Perception for Design by Colin Ware Visual Thinking for Design by Colin Ware
by Ken ChervenCopyright (c) 2015. I fooled around with Gephi at work some months ago. It’s one of the leading options that handles Social Network Analysis, a field that is taking off due to seemingly ubiquitous datasets due to academic publishing and social media. This book teaches you the basics of what Gephi has to offer vis-a-vis this field. I found most interesting the idea of a temporally-based social network – i.e., one that grows…
by Mario BiagioliCopyright (c) 1993. This work, now considered the definitive treatment on the Galileo saga where he was silenced for arguing for the Copernican view that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, argues that the setting of Galileo’s story has never been well-considered. He was a courtier. He lived under the patronage of various rulers of his day and had to produce great wonders for them. As such,…
by Francis S. Collins(c) 2010 My employer (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) is the world’s leader in implementing the ideas around personalized medicine, so I picked up this audiobook to educate me on what’s going on around me while I drove to and from work. In it, I found interesting stories from patients combined with weighty data from the human genome. Collins maintains a warm bedside manner as well as a writer as he does as…
by Stephen C. Aronoff.(c) 2011. This book was a review – and to some degree, an extension – of medical school for me. I always enjoyed reviewing the medical literature. In fact, it was my favorite part of my medical training and the part I miss the most. I love translating research into clinical advice. Unfortunately, fortune had it that the clinic was not to be my domain, so I sit in the research realm…
by Nathan Yau.(c) 2013 Data Points reads like a friendly textbook engaged with visualization. It is less concerned with tips and tricks, and more concerned with understanding. For instance, on the neverending debate on pie charts, Yau pleads neutrality. He sees that pie charts havetheir place, albeit a limited one, in the visualization domain. As such, he promotes freedom and the ability to choose above all. There are lots of data that need appropriate visualization in…