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Visualizations that make no sense
- sengstrom 13y agoLove the pretzel to illustrate "soft"
- xvedejas 13y agoAnd the pretzel to illustrate "flexible"
- rlvesco7 13y agoCould this also be called "data twerking" ?
- dredmorbius 13y agoI actually might pay to watch Miley Cirus do this.
- zbowling 13y agoI physically twitch reading these. It's worst than cringing. It really physically hurts having so much data that I can interpret. Some of this would be interesting info graphs but then I can't glean anything from any of it and that bothers me to no end.
- ttflee 13y agoWhat's wrong with 'The layered pie slices.'?
- sp332 13y agoApple, at 34%, is almost as big as Google, at 89%.
- Someone 13y agoThe percentges add up to 130%, too. Assuming a simple typo, where the 89 should be 59, the pie slices still look wrong to me. Looking at the relative sizes of the 4% and the 3% slices, that might be a rounding issue (could of instance be 3.7% and 3.3%), but the Apple and Android ones look too big to me.
- ttflee 13y agoYeah, a typo can explain the total percentage issue. But I don't see how wrong it would be to use the pie graph in such a way per se. IMHO, the foremost feature of pie graphs, the angle of sector, is kept.
- erichurkman 13y agoIt turns out you can have your pie and eat 30% of it, too.
- ttflee 13y agoSorry, but I could not get it. If Apple is at 34%, with Google/Android 89%, Windows Phone 4%, and Blackberry 3%, it would be a total of 130%, but 130% of what?
- sp332 13y agoOh! I think the point is: if you're comparing pieces to the whole, you should make a normal pie chart where the pieces are all on the same level. Stacking them up that way isn't really a pie chart at all, it's just a round bar chart.
- eCa 13y agoExcept that you most likely shouldn't use a pie chart to begin with. Unless you know you shouldn't, then it might be ok.
- elements 13y ago(apart from the numbers adding up to 130%...) One issue is that the area of the figure should correspond to the number it represents. For example, the area for 3% should be 75% of the size of the area for 4%, but it clearly isn't in this illustration. If they don't match up, what is the point of having a visual at all? To show that 3% is smaller than 4%? Even if some of the others match up (I can't tell for sure), their shape is so different that it really doesn't give us any better understanding of how 34% compares to 89%. And again, what is the point of a visualization that doesn't aid in understanding?
- erichurkman 13y agoI feel like this site is missing a lot of content from the news media: http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-dishonest-fox-charts/190225 http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-dis... (this is specific to FOX but the same can be applied to most other major news sources, too.) I really want to know the context of some of these, like the social media 'chart': http://wtfviz.net/image/59427832631 http://wtfviz.net/image/59427832631
- joeevans 13y agoI agree. Of course, including the context would make a number of the visualizations make sense, which would defeat the purpose of the site. Of course, visualizations that make sense with no context are the sort I guess the creator of this site likes. Someday, we'll all get our news in nice graphics, without all that bothersome reading and thinking that goes along with context.
- doobius 13y agoThis is hilarious
- bachback 13y agointeresting. the anti-grammar of graphics.
- Roboprog 13y agoExcellent "enterprise" presentation skills! (and this morning's best posted story, IMO)
- Roboprog 13y agoer, I meant "presentment", rather than "presentation".
- ASpring 13y agoA basic statistics course should be required for a college degree.
- bun-neh 13y agoIt often is. Whether or not students learn anything is the issue. Perhaps you could say that basic statistical competency should be required for a college degree.
- ttflee 13y agoSome illustration forms are bad. However, if they were demonstrated in an interactive media, e.g. a touch screen tablet, I bet the situation would be quite different, given that some components were designed to be highlighted through user interactions.
- codezero 13y agoI sympathize with the NASA chart. It was clearly created using IDL, which is powerful but also suffers from allowing lazy scientists to use automatic plot parameters.
- vonmoltke 13y agoEven worse is when said lazy scientists plot time series data as a set of images where each image is autoscaled.
- javajosh 13y agoReally amusing, but there is a deeper interesting point here: people are susceptible to the "Rhetoric of Data". Apart from simple mistakes, it seems clear that people are getting utility that is not related to the information presented out of these graphics, and I hypothesize that utility has everything to do with the rhetorical utility of fancy looking graphics, bright colors, and lots of numbers. "Oh," the audience thinks, "I don't understand this but it looks complicated, so the speaker must be very smart and the point they are making very profound." This is why skepticism is only second to honesty as the most important quality in an organization. Some organizations punish skeptics as being disruptive, but the simple fact is that many times people don't know what the fuck they are talking about, and skeptics are an organization's immune-system. If someone is presenting on something complicated and there are not probing questions, then something is terribly wrong.
- capkutay 13y agoWhat's worse than visualizations that make no sense is visualizations that are good at misrepresenting data. Example: http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/08/how-2012-stacks-up-the-worst-graph-on-record/ http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/08/how-2012-stacks-up-the-w...
- Sprint 13y agoThat is a bad example of a bad example. It is clearly labeled and shows what it wants to show: The previously hottest years and the large jump of that record in 2012. How would you have done it better? What is it misinterpreting?
- capkutay 13y agoThe axis should start at 0 degrees, not 53. The 3 dimensionality distorts it as the orange bars slightly angle to the left and makes 2012 look much bigger in relation to the other bars. If you actually plot all the hottest years on a 2d bar chart starting from 0, it gives a much clearer picture of climate change while still revealing that 2012 was indeed the hottest year on record..
- capkutay 13y agoAlso (this may be my personal opinion), but I think people are used to seeing the x-axis encode time. That visualization makes it look like its slowly getting hotter year after year if you don't pay attention to the labels.
- dgesang 13y agovisualization rule #1: read the labels
- dragonwriter 13y ago> The axis should start at 0 degrees, not 53. If its showing relative magnitude of change, 53 degrees is better than 0. Whether how much farther this is from other "hot" years than they are from each other is a key point is at least debatable. For any purpose for which a zero is needed (which doesn't include showing magnitude of change), for temperature 0 degrees F (which presumably this is -- a real problem with this is that it just specifies degrees, which is ambiguous) is just as arbitrary and inappropriate as 53 degrees F; if you are doing a visualization for which it is important to show a meaningful zero, you'd actually want absolute zero (0K). But for most things related to climate change, there's no reason for "zero" as the baseline. There's certainly purposes for which a meaningful baseline other than 0K or 53F would be appropriate -- what that baseline would be depends on the purpose.
- tgb 13y agoWith a little bit of context, the 3D elevation plot actually makes a lot of sense: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.h... It turns out it's like a continuous contour plot (showing deformation from a Haitian earthquake). Thanks to Google image search, such poorly documented images can be traced back to their source - and context! - quite quickly. This one was on the first page of results.
- 6d0debc071 13y agoAh, the sort of graphs you use when you don't want to be understood. I remember, back when I was doing some research having to explain to people what a standard deviation was and what confidence meant. There are ways to talk to people who don't know statistics - for instance if you talk about percentages people glaze, however, if you talk about 25 people in every hundred, that's something they can tend to engage with better.... If you use a bar chart, people tend to be used to looking at those. Drop 'correlates with' and use 'relates to' - that sort of thing. It seems silly, it's all the same stuff. But some people have addition, division and multiplication as more or less the extent of their mathematical skills - because that's all they've been called upon to use since school. There's nothing wrong with that most of the time, I mean it's entirely understandable, it just means that if you're talking to them half the job is putting it in forms that they can understand.
- joeevans 13y agoActually, the 'Becoming a Data Scientist' one is awesome. The caption derisively says 'Disconnected subway map? Sequential, linear relationships?', but that is exactly what it is. I searched for it and read up on it, and the author thought he'd represent learning paths as subway routes. Data science is now a lot of tools, and I got into reading this map. I know probably 20% of the tools there at the moment. Actually, I found and bookmarked that viz, because it's going to be handy. Sure, it's not perfect, but I like it!