Tom Salvesen asks, is this the worst info-graphic of the year? I say, no. Nobody really cares about these numbers. It’s an amusing feature. The alternative would not be a better display of these data, the alternative would be some photo or cartoon. They’re just having fun. I wouldn’t give it any design awards but [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Statistical graphics category.
A tale of two discussion papers
Over the years I’ve written a dozen or so journal articles that have appeared with discussions, and I’ve participated in many published discussions of others’ articles as well. I get a lot out of these article-discussion-rejoinder packages, in all three of my roles as reader, writer, and discussant. Part 1: The story of an unsuccessful [...]
A graph at war with its caption. Also, how to visualize the same numbers without giving the display a misleading causal feel?
Kaiser Fung discusses the following graph that is captioned, “A study of 54 nations–ranked below–found that those with more progressive tax rates had happier citizens, on average.” As Kaiser writes, “from a purely graphical perspective, the chart is well executed . . . they have 54 points, and the chart still doesn’t look too crammed [...]
The blogroll
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]
Fascinating graphs from facebook data
Yair points us to this page full of wonderful graphs from the Stephen Wolfram blog. Here are a few: And some words: People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also [...]
Displaying inferences from complex models
David Williams writes: I am completing my doctoral dissertation dealing with modeling adverse birth outcomes. The models are complex with 9 risk factors, 5 area level variables and 4 individual level variables. I used hierarchical logistic regression (SAS glimmix) to analyze the data. I am now faced with reporting the results. Can you please recommend [...]
Psychology experiments to understand what’s going on with data graphics?
Ricardo Pietrobon writes, regarding my post from last year on attitudes toward data graphics, Wouldn’t it be the case to start formally studying the usability of graphics from a cognitive perspective? with platforms such as the mechanical turk it should be fairly straightforward to test alternative methods and come to some conclusions about what might [...]
Subway series
Abby points us to a spare but cool visualization. I don’t like the curvy connect-the-dots line, but my main suggested improvement would be a closer link to the map. Showing median income on census tracts along subway lines is cool, but ultimately it’s a clever gimmick that pulls me in and makes me curious about [...]
My talk in Chicago this Thurs 6:30pm
Choices in Visualizing Data This time, it’s not at the university, it’s at a data science meetup. Here are the slides. I actually prefer the term “statistical graphics” or “visualizing quantitative information” rather than “visualizing data.” I spend a lot of time graphing inferences and fitted models, understanding my fits and doing exploratory model analysis. [...]
Too tired to mock
Someone sent me an email with the subject line “A terrible infographic,” and it went on from there: “Given some of your recent writing on infovis, I thought you might get a kick out of this . . . I’m certainly sympathetic to their motivations, but some of these plots do not aid understanding… To [...]
Scatterplot charades!
What are the x and y-axes here? P.S. Popeye nails it (see comments).
In which I disagree with John Maynard Keynes
In his review in 1938 of Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data, by H. Gray Funkhauser, for The Economic Journal, the great economist writes: Perhaps the most striking outcome of Mr. Funkhouser’s researches is the fact of the very slow progress which graphical methods made until quite recently. . . . In [...]
The disappearing or non-disappearing middle class
Despite the title, this post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but [...]
How do I make my graphs?
Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes:
“I have no idea who Catalina Garcia is, but she makes a decent ruler”: I don’t know if John Lee “little twerp” Anderson actually suffers from tall-person syndrome, but he is indeed tall
I just want to share with you the best comment we’ve every had in the nearly ten-year history of this blog. Also it has statistical content! Here’s the story. After seeing an amusing article by Tom Scocca relating how reporter John Lee Anderson called someone as a “little twerp” on twitter: I conjectured that Anderson [...]
More research on the role of puzzles in processing data graphics
Ruth Rosenholtz of the department of Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT writes: We mostly do computational modeling of human vision. We try to do on the one hand the sort of basic science that fits in the human vision community, while on the other hand developing predictive models which might actually lend insight into [...]
Life in the C-suite: An graph that is both ugly and bad, and an unrelated story
Jemes Keirstead sends along this infographic: He hates it: First we’ve got an hourglass metaphor wrecked by the fact that “now” (i.e. the pinch point in the glass) is actually 3-5 years in the future and the past sand includes “up to three years” in the future. Then there are the percentages which are appear [...]
“1.7%” ha ha ha
Jordan Ellenberg writes: Lots of people sharing this today. Isn’t this exactly the kind of situation where they should have done some kind of shrinkage towards the national mean, as in that thing you wrote about kidney cancer rates by county? i.e. you see, just as you might expect, the extreme values of “proportion of [...]
MLB Hall of Fame Voting Trajectories
Kenny Shirley sends along this interactive data visualization: What I learned from this was that Jim Rice is in the Hall of Fame! I remember watching him play. Whenever he struck out with a man on first base, we were just so relieved that he hadn’t hit into a double play.
Ugly ugly ugly
Denis Cote sends the following, under the heading, “Some bad graphs for your enjoyment”: To start with, they don’t know how to spell “color.” Seriously, though, the graph is a mess. The circular display implies a circular or periodic structure that isn’t actually in the data, the cramped display requires the use of an otherwise-unnecessary [...]
My talk last night at the visualization meetup
It went pretty well, especially considering it was an entirely new talk (even though, paradoxically, all the images were old), and even though I had a tough act to follow: I came on immediately after an excellent short presentation by Jed Dougherty on some cool information and visualization software that he and his colleagues are [...]
The power of the puzzlegraph
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that the following project from Krisztina Szucs and Mate Cziner has won their visualization challenge, “launched in September 2012 to solicit visualisations based on the OECD’s data-rich Education at a Glance report”: (The graph is interactive. Click on the above image and click again to see the [...]
My talk at the NY data visualization meetup this Monday!
It’s in midtown at 7pm (on Mon 14 Jan 2013). Last time I talked for this group, I spoke on Infovis vs. Statistical Graphics. This time I plan to just go thru the choices involved in a few zillion graphs I’ve published over the years, to give a sense of the options and choices involved [...]
Recently in the sister blog: Brussels sprouts, ugly graphs, and switched at birth
1. Congress vs. Nickelback: The real action is in the cross tabs: Conservatives are mean, liberals are big babies, and, if supporting an STD is what it takes to be a political moderate, I don’t want to be one. 2. How 2012 stacks up: The worst graph on record?: OK, not actually worse than this [...]
Software is as software does
We had a recent discussion about statistics packages where people talked about the structure and capabilities of different computer languages. One thing I wanted to add to this discussion is some sociology. To me, a statistics package is not just its code, it’s also its community, it’s what people do with it. R, for example, [...]