Resources on creating scientific graphs

For the data analysis course I'm teaching these days, I've been looking into the best way of plotting the data (classical two-dimensional line or scatterplot). There are surprisingly few resources (or I am surprisingly bad at searching for them!)

The classics:

• J. W. Tukey, Exploratory data analysis (1977). 
• Edward Tufte has some interesting things to say, in particular in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), but I do not agree with some of his principles. I'll probably write a detailed post about Tufte in the next weeks.
• W. S. Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data (1985).

The moderns:

• Kelly, D., Jasperse, J., and Westbrooke, I. Designing science graphs for data analysis and presentation, technical report (2005). Freely available.
• Kamat, P., Hartland, G. V., and Schatz, G. C. Graphical Excellence. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 5, 2118–2120 (2014). This open-access editorial gives a succinct list of do's and don'ts, as well as an example of a well-structured graph. Contains useful tips for submissions to ACS journals.
• Ten examples of bad graphs, with very short discussion.
• M. Friendly, Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization (2009). Extremely detailed.

Good research practice

The Ethics Committee of the CNRS has published (in French only, as far as I can see) a Guide for the promotion of truthful and responsible research.

The guidelines are quite reasonable, but what drew my attention is the front cover: three ladies, a senior researcher, a more junior one and —probably— a PhD student or postdoc are huddled around a multi-well plate, each of them pointing at a different well. Note the micro-pipette in the foreground (shorthand for "this is a biology research lab"). Note also that the boss is in her street clothes and her bare hand is dangerously close to the samples. Maybe one should add to this guide rule 0.1: "Use appropriate protective equipment ?!"

Borges and Nietzsche

Borges was influenced by Nietzsche's ideas, in particular his "eternal return" (see The Doctrine of Cycles) and mentions him explicitly in some of his stories (e.g. Deutsches Requiem). What I have only recently realized is that Borges' story Funes the memorious (already mentioned in a previous post) is prefigured in Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation¹:

Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forget­ting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger.

Nietzsche's  has already been invoked in relation with Funes², but as far as I can tell (I do not have access to the full text of the paper) only with respect to the difficulty of forming general concepts.

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^{1. Breazeale, D., & Hollingdale, R. J. (1997). Nietzsche: Untimely meditations. Cambridge University Press.↩}

^{2. Martin, C. W. (2006). Borges Forgets Nietzsche, Philosophy and Literature 30(1), 265-276.↩}

The politics of disgust

Right in time for the midterm elections we hear that liberals and conservatives react differently to disgusting images. I find it very surprising, the more so because I have never been able to understand how a single variable can account for so many orthogonal issues (citing from the paper): pacifism/abortion rights/welfare spending/torture of terrorism suspects etc.