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Emile comments on What topics would you like to see more of on LessWrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Data visualisation - making and understanding neat graphs that present data. It's not something analytical nerds like us are usually that good at, but it's a skill worth developing. Just look at all this sexy stuff!
There's some tension between presenting data honestly (see this discussion, which motivated me to write this post), and I think LessWrong can have higher standards than some blogs who just like pretty sexy pictures.
(edit: here's another discussion of the tension between data analysis and neat design)
MATLAB is pretty good at this. Are you interested in a tutorial on [data visualization in] MATLAB, or something else?
If people prefer free software, Octave is, I am told, a good free substitute for MATLAB, although I have no experience with it myself and would be unable to write a post on it.
If you're clever, R is wonderful for this and free. There's a fairly large working group in the stat department here at Iowa State dedicated to statistical graphics, and they exclusively use R. An alum designed the ggplot2 package.
I would love to see some postings exhibiting clever ways to use R to model and present ideas in Bayesian reasoning, data analysis, or evolutionary optimization.
Is there a good existing tutorial for R? If not, do you have the time and background to write one?
My personal favorite: Quick-R
There are plenty of tutorials for R - just google. I'm sure someone else has written a much better tutorial than I could write.
R is a full blown programming language without a simple to use GUI (at least not in the base package), so if you don't have any programming experience it might be slow going. But the freedom of a programming language makes the learning curve worth it (if you've used SAS, you understand what I mean)
My grad program offers 1 credit course in R to first year grad students, and much of it is available online. When it comes to statistical graphics, the stuff on ggplot2 is particularly relevant, and in the first 2-3 sets of lecture notes.
See also the ggplot2 reference manual
That could be useful (R is open source too, and seems to be more popular than Octave or even Matlab).
What would also be useful would be tips on how to present data in a understandable, attractive, and non-misleading way (i.e. not a bunch of tables or a basic unreadable scatterplot).
I'm thinking of Razib Khan's posts, who tend to have nice eye-candy. Developping those kind of skills in LessWrongers would be neat.