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Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?
by Rexxar 10y ago
Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?
- artursapek 10y agoYeah, it looks hilariously fake.
- the_duke 10y agoI just checked. They gauges moving around is definitely random. The updates are done with a "president.json" file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds. So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging. Maybe a bit disingenuous. (Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of president.json)
- yoloswagins 10y agoCheck the websocket connection. Haven't noticed anything interesting coming down the pipe yet, but NYT is using it.
- the_duke 10y agoNope, no websocket connection on that page. That's what I checked first. ;)
- pat_space 10y agoThanks the_duke!
- Steko 10y agoI think the idea is to indicate these numbers have error bands: The estimates below include an estimate of uncertainty. We expect the uncertainty around these estimates to narrow, especially after races are called. I don't see any reason why we'd expect the uncertainty to be updated more than every 30-180 seconds or why any of this is the least bit "disingenuous".
- yankyou 10y agoThat would make sense, if they didn't have _actual_ error bands as well.
- the_duke 10y agoI'm pretty sure it's so people don't just leave right away. No one want's to look at a static page fore more than a few seconds, once you have taken in the information. And I guarantee you that there are plenty of visitors on that page right now, staring at the gauges with fascination.
- geowwy 10y ago> I think the idea is to indicate these numbers have error bands: It's also a hint that the page isn't static.
- revelation 10y agoAs the recent events show, these "error bands" would have to be off the fucking scale. So in showing wrong uncertainty, they are being even more disingenuous.
- yankyou 10y agoI'd venture further to say it's a perversion of "news" for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.
- dj-wonk 10y agoYes, it is an abuse of our attention and a poor choice in information presentation. Who can we contact at NYT to complain?
- maxerickson 10y agohttp://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/contact-the-public-editor/ http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/contact-the-public-edi...
- dj-wonk 10y agoI doubt the public editor has much of an impact, if any, on the interactive tools.
- maxerickson 10y agoExamining whether the graphic is misleading is exactly in their purview. If they believe it is, they would be as likely as anyone to improve their standards and processes. Of course they aren't going to get it fixed tonight if that is what you are thinking.
- scrollaway 10y agoJitter is a visualization of uncertainty. Rather than display a range, it displays a needle moving within that range. It's only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it's a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error. Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn't one of them? I mean, really, an "abuse of our attention" - what?
- yoloswagins 10y agoLooking though the source code, they have a jitter amount. It adds a little visual interest.
- pat_space 10y agoI thought the same thing, would like to see the background calculations running all three.
- revelation 10y agoThat's random, there is no network activity. Screams "black pattern", who on earth randomizes a graph on election results. Come on.
- artursapek 10y agoNYT is not known for accuracy
- carlob 10y agoWell in this context, it's good to make it wobble to show people that accuracy is meaningless so far, because we have very low precision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
- susw 10y agoDisable jitter by running the following in console: require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return 0;}
- the_duke 10y agoHaha, awesome find. Did you just dig through the code or are you a NYT dev?
- susw 10y agoDug through the code. Just inspected the element showing the number to get the class (.widget-info-display-cont) and searched through 'general-main.js' to find where the element is created. A timer that updates the value in the element is found ~100 lines further down.
- spacehacker 10y agoWhat does the require statement do?
- tedmiston 10y agoThat's how they load the module that does the jittering. So by assigning its .get() method to be a noop instead (return 0), it does nothing (besides pointlessly return zero) when attempting to load.
- farnsworth 10y agoIncrease the jitter amount with the following: require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return Math.random()*10;}
- lucio 10y agoElection Time! require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return new Date().getSeconds()-30;}
- Tinyyy 10y agoI think it's an interesting way to represent uncertainty; it seems pretty intuitive to me.
- ajmurmann 10y agoIt is a intuitive visualization, but also makes it hard to tell when things actually change.
- eltoozero 10y agoA decent mechanism to minimize page refreshes at the very least. Periodic real updates with something more expressive than a spinner, which have never been convincing enough to keep me from mashing reload.