Data Analysis Gifts

"I'll pause for a moment so you can let this information sink in."

'People who can read Venn diagrams...'

"It doesn't matter what you like - according to the demographics, this is the car for you."

"Hold everything! The P.R. department just sent over this chart."

'In other words, statistics prove that statisticians aren't always right.'

Had volumes of data at my fingertips and still didn't see this one coming.

Department of Pure Speculation.

'This red line indicates the change in this red line over a period of time,'

Santa sits in front of computers with naughty data and nice data screens.

'I've analyzed, condensed and simplified the data...it was a good quarter.'

SURVEYS-R-US: "87% of the 56% who completed more than 23% of the survey thought it was a waste of time."

"We've seen all the data and crunched all the numbers, now, heads or tails?"

'Having conducted a comprehensive analysis of dozens of subsets of data from a wide range of sources we've confirmed that the likely answer is 36...now we just need to identify the question.'

'But then again...we could be wrong.'

"There's a lot of uncertainty out there these days. Or not. Who knows?"

'We're beginning to see some positive patters in the emerging data.'

'That's it, in a nutshell.'

Room for Error

Pie chart - What were we studying, again?

"I'm going to bombard you with graphs until you agree with me."

"Look, we've got to improve our voter-tracking algorithms if we want to make more accurate wild-ass guesses."

"And this projected sales increase has a margin of error of 100%."

"Joan, I need you to prepare an objective analysis proving I'm correct."

"What a week!"

"I love your optimism."

'Oh no. More lab results.'

"The danger with studying anything this closely is that you lose sight of the context."

"Well, we know it's WAY down there, but it may be beyond the range of our equipment."

'Well, no, I don't see any patterns in this data, but I did see Elvis in my oatmeal this morning!'

'If at first you don't get the survey results you want on your first survey, get mad and tear it up.'

'I don't know, I just thought my data dashboard could use some fuzzy dice.'

"...and this chart shows people clearly prefer bar graphs to pie charts."

"Graph A is verified by Graph B. Graph B is verified by Graph C. Graph C is verified by Graph A. So you see...it's all verified."

"Brilliant report, I can't tell where the facts and the fiction begins"

'As you can see here, there were a few downticks, followed by a few upticks, finishing off with some antics.'