Posts filed under Graphics (394)

• ChCh Press has a sensible story explaining that apparent clustering of murders is probably just chance variation
• Just when you thought I was getting tired of pie charts, here’s a beauty from a company that does exhibits for court trials

To be fair, the purpose of the chart probably is just to look ugly and complicated, not to convey quantitative information

• A fascinating statistic: 1/3 of emergency calls (111 number) are due to pocket dialing from mobile phones. Since nearly 50% are real, that means Kiwi butts are responsible for twice as many calls as pranks and cranks.

An interesting piece in Slate on longevity (via @juhasaarinen).  Unlike the typical story using life expectancy, it’s by someone who seems to understand what it means. There’s also an interactive graph of how causes of death have changed over time, which is notable for having the best use of a creative y-axis scale I’ve seen in a long time.

If you look at ‘influenza and pneumonia’, there is a general decrease with a dramatic spike in 1919. It’s so dramatic that it pops out of the top of the lower panel and spikes into the upper panel. This is the famous Spanish Flu pandemic — the same  rate in today’s New Zealand would mean over 25000 deaths.  Fortunately the three flu pandemics we’ve had since then have all been much less nasty.

It’s also worth noting that nearly all the decline in infections as a major cause of death happened before antibiotics became widely available in the mid-1940s. That’s the reason I’m not really convinced that antibiotic resistances is going to kill us all, though it’s certainly worth avoiding.

From this morning’s Twitter feed

• An animated GIF (click on it to wake it up) showing how to improve a barchart by removing junk. [from Darkhorse Analytics: Data looks better naked]

• Data journalism: how the data sausage gets made.  Jacob Harris describes how he collected and summarised data on meat recalls in the US
• The Royal Statistical Society has repeated the simple maths test they gave politicians last year, this time for senior professionals and managers. Less than half of them could give the probability of getting two heads from tossing two coins.
• However, the same Royal Statistical Society news item ends “The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+)”. This seems to me to fall in the “not even wrong” category. The target group aren’t remotely representative of all British adults, and I’d be surprised if it was even possible to reweight them to the national age distribution.
• Cathy O’Neill (mathbabe.org) asks why rankings of eg, cars or universities don’t allow the user to change priorities for different attributes (as the OECD Better Life Index does, for example)

Statistics New Zealand is marking 120 years of women’s suffrage with a nice little infograph (click to enlarge).

The graphics are a recent development, and long may they continue (and that the print media and teachers make the most of them). The last SNZ graphic I saw marked the birth of a certain baby called George, and looked at a range of facts and figures to do with child-rearing in New Zealand.

One of our early Stat-of-the-Week awards was for this graph from The Standard

Among the problems is that the graph is cumulative, so it unavoidably goes up.  It’s a good choice if you want the impression of a relentless increase regardless of the data; not so good if you’re trying to inform.

Tim Cook, of Apple, did something similar with iPhone sales at the product release yesterday

David Yanofsky, at Quartz, overlays the quarterly sales reports

It’s clear that quarterly sales have been declining recently, although it’s also clear that each new iPhone leads to a sales surge.  The quarterly reports actually tell you something about the sales pattern; the cumulative reports really don’t.

In the same way, although these two graphs of StatsChat page views contain the same information, the first one lets you see  patterns over time, such as the start of the rugby-prediction season, and the times I’m away. Cumulative charts are usually less useful and often misleading, whether deliberately or not.

A live visualisation of  locations for a light-rail system in San Francisco. The diagonal lines show the timetable schedule, so you can see speed as well as lateness

Something like this for Auckland buses would be neat, but, sadly, the bus location data are secret.

There’s a website that shows a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands, colour-coded by age. To start you off, here’s central Amsterdam

(from Abi Sutherland)

The site “WTF Visualizations” does basically what it says on the tin: collecting really badly-inspired data graphics. For example

and

Some of the entries seem too good to be true, a suspicion reinforced by the fact that Google’s reverse image search can’t find them anywhere else on the web, but it is certainly entertaining.

There’s an op-ed piece in the New York Times (by a physicist, Adam Frank) about how no-one pays attention to science any more, and it’s all political, with creationism and climate change denial as the main examples.

Chad Orzel (also a physicist) is unconvinced

 [T]he question is whether we’ve fallen off from some golden age when everybody listened raptly to the best science had to offer…. After all, as depressing as it may be for forty-odd percent of the population to want to align themselves with a creationist position (whether from honest belief or out of tribal identification), that’s probably an improvement from the days of the actual Scopes trial. Which, it should be noted, Scopes lost, unlike the several more recent cases where teaching of creationism has been soundly rejected by the courts.

 He points to other questions whether there hasn’t been as much political propaganda and where basic scientific knowledge is improving.

The US Census Bureau has put together an interactive map of languages other than English spoken in the US — you can look at all speakers of the language, or just those who are not fluent in English, for a range of languages.

Here’s the map for (preferentially) French speakers, showing concentrations in Maine (near French Canada) and Louisiana (Cajun) that I’d expect, groups in the major cities, and a cluster I don’t understand in northwestern Georgia