The New York Times has an interesting interactive visualization on the influence of presidents on the economy. They ask, Can a President Tame the Business Cycle? The visualization they use is not bad, but would be much more readable if it used a better color scale.

There's new competition for Swivel and Many Eyes: iCharts. A good name, to be sure, but will they live up to their promise of being "YouTube for Charts" (a claim Swivel also made in the beginning)? A first look at their website suggests that they likely will not.

The New York Times uses some of the best information graphics and visualizations on its web site and in the printed paper. But there is also a strange undercurrent of bad graphics, many of which commissioned from other sources, and often published in the New York Times Magazine. It almost feels like between all the good graphs, they need an outlet for the crazy stuff. 

One of the most common mistakes in chart design is to scale an area by two sides at the same time, producing a quadratic effect for a linear change. That overstates the larger numbers and produces a badly skewed chart. A little care and some basic high-school math can help avoid the problem.

SPSS recently released their new Viz Designer, a visualization engine built on Leland Wilkinson's work (The Grammar of Graphics and nViZn). The comparison with Tableau is unavoidable since both are based on the same underlying ideas. Right now, Viz Designer does not look good in that comparison. 

Colin Ware's latest book Visual Thinking for Design has a promising subtitle: active vision, attention, visual queries, gist, visual skills, color, narrative, design. That's covering quite a bit of ground, and also a lot of things not usually considered in visualization. While this is a book about design, I was interested in what it could teach people in InfoVis, and I review it from that point of view.

A paper on visualization criticism just appeared in the Visualization Viewpoints section of this month's Computer Graphics and Applications (CG&A). Authors are yours truly, Fritz Drury, Lars Erik Holmquist, and David Laidlaw.