virtual worlds (2): damned lies

I love data & statistics so I was mightly pleased to find this article in The Economist. Marvel at the lovely feats visual rhetoric created by Florence Nightingale & co. While I think that virtual worlds have some utility for training (where the skills being taught are primarily concerned with information manipulation), I think the real action is in visualising things you can't find in the real world. If we will indeed be Competing on Analytics more and more in the future then we will need robust ways of understanding this data. Most people are more comfortable with pictures as opposed to numbers so visualisation tools will be critical.