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President Obama announced his intent to appoint several individuals to serve on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. One of them is Edward Tufte who has been my inspiration to look at the housing market with data in different ways. He’s taught me how to see through the BS in charts and tables we are spun with nearly every day – and no – I am not one of his PR people.

He says:

>I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds.

Anyone who has been reading this blog since the early days (2005) knows I am a big fan of Edward Tufte, professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. His self-published books are fascinating and cover the way we present information. I’ve attended one of his seminars when he came to New York.

* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* Envisioning Information
* Visual Explanations
* Beautiful Evidence

I especially love his essay on Powerpoint, the worst way to present information in the history of mankind (ok, so I get a little emotional about the topic). Here’s a sampling.