The Dashboard Dude

This is a Tableau visual or "viz" with birthdays of over 1875 anime and manga characters, grouped and accessible in many ways which I will show you below. However, I know there are still many missing. I will show you how to identify some of them so if you were interested in getting me new characters and their birthdates that I can add to the list, please leave them in the comments. Otherwise, just have lots of fun with this in some of the ways I'll describe below, among others you can find! You can navigate within any of the windows below to access anything the set of dashboards within the viz offers. I just created one window for each dashboard to have a picture of what I'm talking about in describing each dashboard, close to the text to help with reading. TODAY You came here for birthdays, so the ideal greeting is a list of which character's birthday it is today. I think the date mechanism is synced to the time on your browser so that someone ac...

You can find average values of various populations' height, weight and such, but that doesn't give you any idea about the distribution of those measures in the population. If you were to compare yourself to them, the best you could do is to see if you were higher or lower than the average (mean, possibly median if given). You could also do the difference in your measurement to the average, but doesn't give you much of an idea what portion of the population might lie between you and that average. The Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) measures and surveys thousands of Canadians on some physical measures and health determinants, and reports it in various percentiles of the Canadian population. That is, in addition to an average (mean), they also give you values that have 5% of the population below it, as well as 10%, 25%, 50% (median), 75%, 90% and 95% of Canadians below it, with some small margin of error. The CHMS also did it for various demographics of gender and...

The Halifax weather data set was pretty messy, missing lots of little bits of data. However, I still put together a set longer than 100 years that I'll do for other locations because relatively many people in Nova Scotia live here that I didn't want to leave them all out.

Today's Tableau dashboard exercise has weather for Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. The folks keeping weather data there also did a great job over all that time, similar to those in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to have provided a lot of this data from but a few weather stations. Some locations needed not only a lot more, but a lot more a lot more often! Today's exercise for me was mostly to see how easily interchangeable data sets were for doing essentially the same thing in Tableau, but to provide a different product. Sure, it'd be nice to have these two locations, Sydney and Yarmouth, together in one file. However, that'd add an extra dimension to deal with for those who don't care for the other locations. That plus you'd have to cater to either the lowest common number of years for which you have data, or have missing data pop up every now and then. I will be doing a Nova Scotia compilation with 8 locations, but getting enough data for them for 100 years as a nice ...

I've been working hard on a bunch of these weather dashboards for places in Nova Scotia, learning while cobbling together data from Environment Canada that was anything but straightforward and convenient. I'm sure they have their reasons for what they do, though, so I'll stick to using it. Sydney had the most complete data, by far, among the places in Nova Scotia, and for the longest period as well. As a result, I'm posting the weather dashboard for it first. Play around with the sliders, hover over things, click on things, etc . and see what you get. Once you figure out where everything is, make up questions to ask yourself to try and figure out, like what were the hottest 5 years between 1923 and 1976? See if the temperature has been getting warmer? Or just look for things like years where the average daily low was below zero degree Celcius! How many people do you think would have guessed that? Those living there would probably guess it rained and/or snowed...

OK. So the first Tableau visualization I got done wasn't anything too thrilling. That's because it was for government work. However, it was with data just two days old, and public data from Statistics Canada that's cumbersome to do analysis on, or even analytics to show what's in there and quickly see what it all means, so there's value in it. StatCan has also never done anything like this publicly with their data, which they should because those CANSIM tables they have are inaccessible in a practical sense to the vast majority of the public. I'm betting the public would love their work a lot more if they visualized all their work to make it interactive and easy to understand like this! Maybe they could hire me to do this full time with all the data they released! :) The 2015 Canadian Community Health (CCHS) Nutrition Survey  seemed to have been one of these horribly complex surveys that will ultimately yield very little useful data unless you really work har...