29 January 2016 - Recently, the minister answered questions from the Finance Committee of the Lower House. One of them questioned the use of a stacked bar chart to show dividends, «since this isn’t very clear».

22 January 2016 - Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the Dutch national statistics office, has always had a solid, if somewhat dull, reputation. The organisation published data, but didn’t do projections and was reluctant to offer interpretations. Meanwhile, it was considered to be among the best statistics offices in the world. But over the past two years, there have been some changes.

22 November 2015 - There are quite a few Javascript libraries that you can use to create interactive graphs (with the added bonus that your graphs look crisp: somehow my PNG images always end up looking blurry). Some of these libraries are based on D3.js and are intended to make coding with D3 easier:

15 November 2015 - People should mind their language: an apparently neutral term like immigration has gotten xenophobic overtones as a result of its frequent use in combination with illegal, James Gingel argued in the Guardian. As an illustration, he pointed out that illegal, when typed into a Google search box, will likely get autocompleted to illegal immigrant or illegal immigration.

23 August 2015 - The districts with their elected councils have always played an important role in Amsterdam politics, but since the elections of 19 March 2014 their powers have been curtailed (I’m simplifying; here’s an explanation in Dutch). One may ask what point there is in having districts if their role is largely reduced to implementing policies set by the city government. And would people still be interested in what they do?