Syed's Blog

5 posts · terminal version · RSS · all tags

Supervisor Emails and My Heart Rate

· phd-life

"Can we talk tomorrow?" with no context has ended many students' sleep. How to build a supervisor relationship where emails don't feel like a medical event.

Canadian Politeness: A Field Study

· life-in-canada

Sorry, eh. A newcomer's observations on Canadian apologies, line-ups, thanking bus drivers and the art of saying no without ever saying no.

Storytelling with Data: The Chart Is Not the Story

· data-science

A slide full of charts is a data dump. A story has a question, a tension and a recommendation. How to present analysis so people remember it and act on it.

Visualisation Sins I Have Committed

· data-science

Truncated axes, 3D pie charts, rainbow colour maps and a legend in a different time zone from the chart. A confession, with fixes.

Dashboards Nobody Opens: A Tragedy in Three Acts

· data-science

Months of work, forty charts, eleven filters and three visitors, two of whom were you. How to build dashboards people actually use.