Target Point

Keep Your Clunker

The cash for clunkers or CARS program has appeared to help some American families, but  from an initial look at the limited amount of Transportation Department data, the reality is that we are discouraging American automobile innovation, while neither improving the environment nor stimulating the economy.

Prior to being a stimulus star, cash for clunkers was part of the energy bill, intended to encourage motorists to purchase more hybrid and fuel-efficient cars and therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  While clunker motorists have purchased...

Keep Your Clunker

A Republican Education Agenda

Today we wanted to draw attention to an important editorial written by Richard Bond - our former Party Chairman -  and our friends at Public Opinion Strategies, Bill McInturff and Alex Bratty, that appeared in this weekend’s Washington Post regarding the desperate need to reform our education system. 

A Chance to Say Yes: The GOP and Obama Can Agree on School Reform

Many issues have created a "politics as usual" atmosphere on Capitol Hill recently, but when it comes to educating our children, it appears President Obama and the Republican Party share some views. This commonality of interest provides the president and the GOP a rare opportunity to cooperate on a major issue.  In a March address on education, the president proposed several reforms, three of which the Republican Party has been championing for years.

http://bit.ly/2UXYq3

Not only do they highlight an issue that has largely fallen off the national stage...

Parallel Sets

In our work with large, complex datasets, we are always looking for new methods to visualize this data.  An effective visualization reveals patterns and trends that may otherwise have been obscured in the data.  Fortunately, data visualization is currently experiencing a renaissance that is moving us well beyond the constraints of the bar graph and pie chart. 

Today, I'd like to highlight one particularly promising new method: Parallel Sets, a method for displaying multi-dimensional categorical data developed by Robert Kosara.  We've used this method below to demonstrate the relationship between presidential ballots cast across multiple elections, collected during our post-election survey in November of last year.

The Most Perfect of Them All

Mark Buehrle’s recent perfect game had the staff at TargetPoint wondering, is there a way we could rank those eighteen perfect games and somehow determine which was the most perfect of them all?  Is there a “perfection metric” we can calculate?  Here’s my attempt at an answer…

A perfect game is defined as a victory in which no opposing player reaches base (and lasts a minimum of nine innings).  Under this definition, there are only two ways a player can be stopped from reaching base: he strikes out, or he is put out following contact with the ball.

The Most Perfect of Them All

Visualizing the Sotomayor Hearings

Sotomayor Hearings Word Cloud