August 20, 2012
Nostra maxima culpa
As Alan Keegan points out in his Stat of the Week nomination, the Stats Department Facebook page was sporting a graph whose only redeeming feature is that it doesn’t even pretend to convey information.
To decide what to do with the graph, we are hosting a bogus poll:
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I like it, but have you got one in pie graph form?
12 years ago
The columns really need to be different thickness and shapes.
12 years ago
OK, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it strikingly phallic in several ways?
12 years ago
I think I used a graph a long similar lines when I was asked to make a speech at a friend’s wedding. Depending on how you rotate it you can make the fortunes go up or down. With no axis labels it doesn’t matter which way up it is. The one I used was a line graph and not a bar chart. it was written on thin paper so that it can be viewed from the back and therefore mirrored. This adds to the number of ways it can be presented and therefore the number of different stories it can tell. As a universal, tell what-you-like prop, it has great merits.
12 years ago
Find the data, we can analyse anything which isn’t even a graph but a profile picture, comeon guys lets give them some tips : )
12 years ago
That’s not a graph. That’s a diagram showing airflow over some cuisenaire rods. Let’s face it, nobody cognisant of statistics would ever use 3-D shapes to present a 2-D result.
12 years ago