YAKOV RAPOPORT, The doctors'plot, transl. Natina Perova and Raissa Bobrova, London, Fourth Estate, 1991, pp. xii, 280, illus., £17.95 (1-872180-13-2). On 13 January 1953, the astounded citizens of the USSR heard a massive "criminal conspiracy" denounced. Prominent Soviet physicians had conspired to kill the leaders of the country by medical means. A round of arrests followed involving high-rank...

Writers of statistics textbooks tend to copy other textooks rather than draw on experience. This leaves a serious ap: Techniques that are highly useful in practice are not aught. With this series of columns I am trying to fill that ap. The first column [1] pointed out that doing something imperfect) is better than doing nothing. The second [2] was bout the value of transforming your data. A thi...

We introduce a new visualization method for temporal data, Spiral Theme Plot, by combining ThemeRiver method, spiral patterns, and scatter plot technique. Similar to ThemeRiver, data in different categories (themes) are visualized in different bands, but also in a spiral pattern. Themes are stacked along a spiral curve, which represent the time axis. Individual data points are plotted within th...

Computer-assisted interactive visualization has become a valuable tool for discovering the underlying meaning of tabular data, including categorical tabular data. The capabilities of the more traditionally mundane kinds of pictures like scatter plots can be expanded to usefully depict categorical tabular data by incorporating annotations and transforms, and by integrating the extensions into an...