Programming gnuplot

One of the side effects of having the word 'visualisation' in your job title is that people expect you to know something about the subject. Accordingly, every now and again I get contacted by one of my colleagues who needs to draw a graph, or reformat an image, or incorporate a visualisation into a document, and is - usually - too busy with other (probably more important) activities to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make a graphics package behave itself and do the right thing.

Good Business Analytics Conference

I have not yet written a note about the good experience I had at the 2011 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Chicago, where NAG had a booth with demonstrations of our library routines. ....I guess 'now' is as good a time as any to do so. The conference was very well attended, up around 30% over last year by many accounts, and included a wide variety of analytical types; academics and practitioners with many different specialities. It was a good opportunity to understand how the best analytical techniques are applied in different environments. During the three days my colleagues and I managed to talk with lots of people. Some were users of NAG routines and some who did not know us at all. It was a pleasure to meet all of you. My note is just to say thanks to fellow attendees, as well as the organizers, for a stimulating 3 days – hope to speak with many of you again soon