Better is subjective though and related to what you're trying to do. A lot of past research was about efficiency of information transfer. There's more recent research looking at memorability. In one report, different graphics could have both goals.
There's plenty more. Stanford Vis group is a fun place to check from time to time: http://vis.stanford.edu/ Heer specifically has a range of papers and some online slides for a vis course he taught http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/ (uses Tufte for the course text)
I'm drawing a blank on a few others I find informative...
Unfortunately, I don't have any about fonts but I'm sure there are plenty out there.
Thanks for joining the discussion. Just want to say I'm working through the the videos for your coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) and, in addition to being a great introduction to Scala, it's changing how I approach other functional languages like JavaScript and R
Definitely, thank you for the offer. I'm running through the install now but will send you an email once I've run a couple tests. I see your contact info is listed on your home page.
The Relite mention at the end looks very worthwhile. We were just about to begin a large rewrite of analysis code from R to CUDA; Relite has the potential to save the effort of rewriting our existing code.
This seems like a great bundle of courses. The big data topics caught my attention but I'm actually looking forward to exploratory data analysis. Especially with the Tukey mention: https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651
Sounds like a market opportunity. Aside from simple accounting (tracking revenue and expenses), what's the range of startup needs that are covered by Excel?
If these needs aren't met by current accounting / finance packages, it definitely opens the door for a new competitor.