Analytics Cartoon Caption Contest

Last weekend I created the cartoon above but realized that the caption I had planned wasn’t particularly funny.  So instead I posted it to twitter and proposed a caption competition. The result was a wonderful outpouring of analytic creativity, and I thank everyone who took part (links below–follow them on Twitter!).

Humor is in the eye of the beholder, but I hereby declare the results of the competition below (Don’t like my choices? Or think you can do better? Comment below!)

The Winners

#1.
DJ Adams @qmacro : “I asked the finance department for a breakdown of the figures and look what they gave me” Link

#2.
Josh Greenbaum @josheac: “Okay, who dropped the pi and didn’t clean up?” Link

#3.
Frank Scavo @fscavo: “This is not what I meant when I asked for a data dump!” Link

Special prize for creative quantity

Dave Kellogg @Kellblog

“The answer is clearly 100,000 but we’re not sure if it’s dollars, yen, or bitcoins” Link

“The answer’s right there in the numbers” Link

“Now that we have in-memory technology cubes are out and triangles in” Link

“This is the little data pile produced by Hadoop extracting from the big data” Link

Special prize for snark

Donald MacCormick @Donaldmac 

“What do you mean I could sort it out myself with Lumira? Do you job properly and deliver some real end-user BI” Link

Additional entries

Decisions, decisions…

• Mike Urbonas @mikeurbonas : “This is NOT what I meant when I said “We’ve got to make our numbers”! Link
• Mahmoud A. Haleem @mahmoudahmed77 : “How can I take decision with that? Put it in a context!” Link
• Tammy Powlas @tpowlas : “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”-Einstein Link
• Ray Rivera@rayjrivera : “The numbers clearly show there is room for two at the top.” Link

It’s a mess…

• Sarah Goodall?@SarahGoodall: “I expected sales to deliver their numbers…not quite like this” Link
• Brenton O’Callaghan @callaghan001 : “Right you lot – who’s been materialising their aggregates again!!: Link
•  Yves de Montcheuil @ydemontcheuil : “Who spilled that Sudoku all over?” Link
• Steve Rumsby @steverumsby : “I can’t sign off the accounts until you figure out where these go…” Link
• Todd Belcher @toddmetrics : “Has anyone seen my other 9? It was here a minute ago.” Link
• Che Analytics! @curtispokrant: “Where is the $ ?? Now it’s just a pile of numbers. Link
• Runali Ghosh @RunaliG : “Most summarized data for highest management level” Link
• Mani Gill @manigill : “the #’s don’t lie” Link

Kinda geeky…

• CarlJDubois @CarlJDubois : “I just tripped over this square root, broke it into pieces of its square, and sprained my ankle. Who left it here?” Link
• James Ruotolo @jdruotolo : “Honey! Our source system went on the carpet again!” Link
• Gary Boyle @gaz_boyle : “New version of countdown, using all these numbers, make them equal 937” Link
• Vijay Vijayasankar @vijayasankarv : “now imagine if we were to deal with 1 and 0 alone” Link

Piles and Pyramids:

• Sylvia Santelli @sylviasant : “My pile of data is bigger then your pile of data, and neither of us know what to do with it. ;)” Link
• Stannie Holt @stannieholt : “When I asked about our “Big Data,” this is not what I meant!” Link
• Mahmoud A. Haleem @mahmoudahmed77 : “my data is as old as a pyramid 🙂 #realtime” Link
• tarik parkar @tarik_parkar : “pyramid cube data warehouse: Link

Finally, my own meager efforts:

• “I’m not going to take you seriously unless you first clean up this messy data!”
• “What do you want me to do with this?! It’s completely unstructured!”
• “Maybe these missing numbers were the reason our Super Bowl prediction sucked”?
• “What do you mean by ‘Hadoop droppings’?!”