Edward Tufte

• Professor Emeritus at Yale University

ALTHOUGH THE SYNCHRONIZATION OF ECONOMIC FLUCTUations with the electoral cycle often preoccupies political leaders, the real force of political influence on macroeconomic performance comes in the determination of economic priorities. Here the ideology and platform of the political party in power dominate. Just as the electoral calendar helps set th...

Bernard Berelson wrote a memoir about Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings , a book that brought together 1,003 findings about human behavior with some reasonable supporting evidence. Berelson offered a threefold grand summary of all social science research: (1) Some do, some don't. (2) The differences aren't very great. (3) It's mor...

The authors propose a method of summarizing clinical data to serve patient care. The proposed one-page summary uses diverse visual presentations of data, including small graphs for ratings and drug dosages, time lines for clinic visits and hospital stays, and genograms for inherited illness, as well as a textual presentation of recent clinical note...

As an extension of his observations described in his earlier book, "Envisioning Information", Tuftes third installment of the trilogy turns the discussion to the display of dynamic information. Again, Tufte draws from numerous examples throughout history to illustrate his points. The chapter on Visual and Statistical Thinking contains some of the m...

PROGRESS IN COMMUNICATION SCIENCES, VOLUME IV, edited by Brenda Dervin and Melvin Voigt (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing, 1984---$32.50)

Speculations about the effects of politics on economic life have a long and vital tradition, but few efforts have been made to determine the precise relationship between them. Edward Tufte, a political scientist who covered the 1976 Presidential election for "Newsweek," seeks to do just that. His sharp analyses and astute observations lead to an ey...

Thirteen major data sources for the study of American politics are examined with regard to their conceptual orientation, error structure, and inferential utility. A great deal of ephemera and measurement without theory is discovered. Few of the documents contain any serious discussion of error structure, although some do report “standard errors” ba...

Four of the fancier and newer pocket electronic calculators are evaluated in terms of their utility for doing data analysis, their price, and their quality. Some general principles, perhaps helpful for the consumer of calculators, are derived from the experience--including: (1) Always buy at a discount. (2) Competition has its benefits in this sect...

An explanatory model for the outcomes of midterm congressional elections is developed. Midterms are a referendum on the performance of the President and his administration's management of the economy. The explanatory model of midterm congressional elections is sufficiently powerful so as to yield honest and accurate pre-election predictions of the...

Using election returns from all U.S. counties for 14 presidential elections, this study investigates the utility of election forecasting based on “bellwether” or “barometric ”electoral districts.

An enduring fact of life in democratic electoral systems is that the party winning the largest share of the votes almost always receives a still larger share of the seats. This paper tests three models describing the inflation of the legislative power of the victorious party and then develops explanations of the observed differences in the swing ra...

Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Obra sobre la representación de información a través de gráficas e imágenes, revisando estrategias de diseño, edición, análisis y crítica de representaciones de datos.

Students of politics use statistical and quantitative techniques to: summarize a large body of numbers into a small collection of typical values; confirm (and perhaps sanctify) the results of the analysis by using tests of statistical significance that help protect against sampling and measurement error; discover what's going on in their data and e...

Many empirical investigations in the behavioral sciences today aim at tracing the causes of variations in some key dependent variable. The search for satisfying causal explanations is difficult because of the complexity of social phenomena, the crudeness of the measures of many important variables, and the prevalence of simultaneous cause and effec...