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Grand Haven Happy |
Then WHY do you keep on reading it, Unrepresented? Unsmart! |
Grand Haven Happy.....6 Unrepresented.....0 "There's no water in or near it." hmmm' Apparently Candy, you have not yet driven a 1/2 mile more due West and witness a bazillion acres of our fresh water lake then, 1 more mile due South to our Coast Guard Station and catwalk pier history. Summin' tells me that your questio... |
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Last week, I was asked to divulge what I'm using for a device as my daily driver. I'm sure it surprised more than a few people that it happened to be a Samsung Galaxy S5 and not an iPhone. It surprised me, that's for sure. Well, it turns out that due to a mishap with Apple's iMessage (which so many people have experien... |
Now, I'm back on the Galaxy S5, all my troubles figured out with that other device's features, and ready to dig into another one of our 30 day challenges. This Day 1 is a bit different than in previous challenges, due simply to the fact that I had already used the device for more than a day the week prior. So, instead ... |
Having switched back to the iPhone for a brief stint, only to come back to the Galaxy S5 reminded me of how much I actually like the back of the larger device. I may be getting used to plastic devices, simply because I don't have a choice, but I still don't prefer them. With that being said, the Galaxy S5's plastic, di... |
Overall, with the 5.1-inch display, the Galaxy S5 still feels pretty good in the hand. I wouldn't normally use a handset with a display this big on my own terms, simply because I'm just not a fan of the size, but the design of the device can play a big role in making the experience better or worse. Thanks to the lightw... |
What's more, it hasn't slipped out of my hand and threatened to dent my face (yet), so that's something. |
There are two things that annoy me quite a bit, though. |
First: the door that blocks the charging ports on the bottom of the handset. It's designed to make sure to fill in all the nooks and crannies just in case you spill water on your device. It's one of the many parts that makes the Galaxy S5 a water-resistant handset. It's great in theory, but it drives me crazy having to... |
Second: removing the back cover, for any reason at all, will give you a big, in-your-face pop-up when you turn on the device next that you need to make sure the cover is in tact properly, to make sure that the device is properly resistant to all that water. It doesn't matter how many times you take the back cover off. ... |
Sure, most people (presumably) won't be opening the back cover all that frequently, but if you do, to get a microSD card or whatever other reason you may have, it's an annoying warning. It isn't at first, but it quickly becomes one. |
So, that's it for now. At a very basic level, the Galaxy S5 is a decent device. I may not prefer plastic and there are some design choices that I just don't agree with, but overall it isn't terrible. I like the Galaxy S5 more than I've liked any previous Galaxy S device in a very, very long time, so that has me looking... |
Did you pick up or have you checked out the Galaxy S5? If so, what do you think of Samsung's flagship device? Let me know! |
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Is chartjunk really “more useful” than plain graphs? I don’t think so. |
Helen DeWitt links to this blog that reports on a study by Scott Bateman, Carl Gutwin, David McDine, Regan Mandryk, Aaron Genest, and Christopher Brooks that claims the following: |
Guidelines for designing information charts often state that the presentation should reduce ‘chart junk’–visual embellishments that are not essential to understanding the data. . . . we conducted an experiment that compared embellished charts with plain ones, and measured both interpretation accuracy and long-term reca... |
As the above-linked blogger puts it, “chartjunk is more useful than plain graphs. . . . Tufte is not going to like this.” |
I can’t speak for Ed Tufte, but I’m not gonna take this claim about chartjunk lying down. |
I have two points to make which I hope can stop the above-linked study from being slashdotted and taken as truth. |
1. The non-chart-junk graphs in the paper are not so good. Figure 1 is a time series of dollars that is unhelpfully presented as a bar chart and which is either unadjusted for inflation or, if adjusted, is not indicated as such. Figure 2a is a lineplot that whose y-axis should go down to 0, but doesn’t. Both graphs als... |
Chartjunk aside, it’s hard to make good graphs, so I can’t really blame Bateman et al. for their performance here. They’re doing about as well as might be expected in routine psychology research. And maybe they’re right that crappy chartjunk graphs are better than crappy non-chartjunk graphs. But I don’t think it’s app... |
2. This brings me to my second point, which is that a huge, huge drawback of chartjunk is that it limits the amount of information you can display in a graph. If all you want is to display a sequence of 5 numbers, then, sure, go for the chartjunk, I don’t really care. But why limit yourself to only displaying 5 numbers... |
1. zbicyclist says: |
"Figure 1 is a time series of dollars that is unhelpfully presented as a pie chart". Is this a typo? "Monstrous Costs" of house campaigns is a bar chart, at least in the version I downloaded. Because the observations are two years apart, that's not necessarily the worst format. |
Figure 2 is interesting. The "standard" 2b is a truly horrible pie chart, and it's easy to see that the "chartjunk" 2b — with the wedge coming out of the pie chart shown as a woman's bright red lips — would lead to better memory of the fact that 8 cents of every cosmetic dollar is spent on ingredients. |
2. CTV says: |
This blog points out that a careful reading reveals many flaws in the original paper: |
3. Andrew Gelman says: |
Zbicyclist: Yes, it's a bar chart. I fixed that typo. |
4. derek says: |
Did they really test understanding the data? It sounded to me like they just tested for remembering the slogan. Two graphs are called "Diamonds *were* a girl's best friend", but only one shows a picture of a girl and some diamonds. Two graphs are called "Monstrous costs" but only one shows a monster. Two graphs are... |
The common features here are that 1) a picture is a mnemonic that lets the viewers remember 2) an assertion. Funny how the data isn't even considered in the comparison. It could have been completely absent from the jazzed-up graphs, or even contradicted their message, without affecting the message at all. |
But it's *because* plain graphs and tables are duller as push propaganda that they're better as factual communication. |
5. Kris Rogers says: |
I worked a few years ago with a group of epidemiologists who had completed an experimental study of features to improve interpretation of graphs. Not published in peer-reviewed literature but it is easily available: |
One interesting thing I remember was the correct interpretation of pie graphs. Respondents without a university education did much better at correctly estimating the magnitude of a difference in a pie graph than those with an university education. |
I had a quick look at Bateman et al and I couldn't find any information on their study population – not very helpful! |
6. Steve Sailer says: |
My experience from years in the marketing research industry is that audiences generally don't like the kind of data-rich graphs that you, me, and Ed Tufte find so valuable. |
By the way, I'm reading The Pinch by David Willetts (the Science and University Minister in the new British coalition government), which is the hot book of the moment in British wonkdom. It's quite good, with lots and lots of fascinating data. (Did you know that in Britain, 50% of middle class children have a telev... |
Except … tBut there isn't a single graph in the entire book. Willetts laboriously converts all his data on quantitative subjects like pension contributions over generations into paragraphs of words. |
Books like The Pinch aren't really written to be read, they are written to be reviewed and talked about in the broadsheet press. And the reviewers are primarily ex-English majors who are allergic to quantitative graphs. |
7. Aaron Genest says: |
Just browsing through comments on our paper and I ran into this one. I thought I'd draw your attention to a few little points. First, we didn't claim that one or the other kind of chart is "better", simply that those that incorporated chartjunk were more memorable (significantly so with respect to the theme of the ... |
Thanks for your interest in the paper! |
Take the 2-minute tour × |
This is pretty trivial, but if someone has the answer handy, I'd appreciate it. |
I use the msdb..sp_send_dbmail sproc as a lightweight way to distribute simple reports. This often entails producing a CSV. However, the sproc includes the Unicode little-endian prefix FF FE. This confuses Excel, causing it to not automatically parse the CSV into columns. |
There are a number of workarounds: use a real reporting platform (we have Crystal, but it's never worked reliably); send the file to a little app that converts the file to ANSI and sends it on; use tab delimiters (my favorite); or educate the recipients about how to work with CSVs (just kidding, we all know that's not ... |
However, I'd love to just flip a switch somewhere and tell MSSQL to stop creating the attachments as Unicode, as I have no such need. I haven't found such a setting yet; is this possible? |
Based on Rohan's answer, this script in a SQL Agent job step almost works: |
$reportQuery = "EXEC Routine..TopTenReviewsReport @DoNotLog = 1" |
$filePath = "\\SQLBI001\RawData\TopTenReviewsReport.csv" |
$mailQuery = " |
EXEC msdb..sp_send_dbmail |
@profile_name = 'X', |
@recipients = 'X', |
@subject = 'X', |
@file_attachments = '" + $filePath + "'" |
$result = Invoke-Sqlcmd -query $mailQuery |
The file now has a "#TYPE System.Data.DataRow" prefix, instead of 0xFF FE, but it's now ANSI, so that's something. |
share|improve this question |
Clarification: I'm testing with Excel 2007, but 2K10 seems to have the same issue. Removing the prefix is enough for Excel to parse the file, it does not have to be ANSI. – Jon of All Trades Sep 28 '11 at 21:51 |
@Surfer513: Thanks for the tag, I could have sworn I tried that and it did not exist. – Jon of All Trades Sep 29 '11 at 14:28 |
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1 Answer |
I think you can generate the reports using powershell and then use DBMail to mail the attachments |
Write-host "Running SQL Query to export to ANSI CSV file" |
Invoke-Sqlcmd -Query $dbQuery -ServerInstance $instanceName | export-csv $targetFileAnsi |
Write-host "Running SQL Query to export to Unicode CSV file" |
Invoke-Sqlcmd -Query $dbQuery -ServerInstance $instanceName | export-csv $targetFileUnicode -encoding "unicode" |
$dbMailQuery1 = "execute msdb..sp_send_dbmail |
@profile_name = 'msft_profile', |
@recipients = 'seths@microsoft.com', |
@subject = 'Email with Attachment - ANSI attachment', |
@body_format = 'TEXT', |
@body = 'This email has ANSI file attached to it', |
@file_attachments = 'c:\temp\result_ansi.csv' " |
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlagent/archive/2011/07/06/email-query-output-as-ansi-unicode-file-attachment-using-powershell-and-database-mail.aspx |
share|improve this answer |
Hmm, and PowerShell is available via SQL Agent, which (I should have mentioned) is how I'm starting the jobs. Write-host is not available in that context, but that's minor. Unfortunately, the generated file has a different prefix: "#TYPE System.Data.DataRow". It is indeed ANSI now, though. – Jon of All Trades Sep 29 '... |
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