
Visualizations that make no sense - denzil_correa
http://wtfviz.net/
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javajosh
Really 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.

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tgb
With a little bit of context, the 3D elevation plot actually makes a lot of
sense:
[http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.h...](http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/haiti20101014img.html)

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.

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erichurkman
I feel like this site is missing a lot of content from the news media:
[http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-
dis...](http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-dishonest-
fox-charts/190225) (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)

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joeevans
I 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.

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zbowling
I 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.

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6d0debc071
Ah, 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.

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codezero
I 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
Even worse is when said lazy scientists plot time series data as a set of
images where each image is autoscaled.

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ASpring
A basic statistics course should be required for a college degree.

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bun-neh
It 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.

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joeevans
Actually, 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!

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rlvesco7
Could this also be called "data twerking" ?

~~~
dredmorbius
I actually _might_ pay to watch Miley Cirus do this.

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sengstrom
Love the pretzel to illustrate "soft"

~~~
xvedejas
And the pretzel to illustrate "flexible"

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capkutay
What'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-w...](http://themonkeycage.org/2013/01/08/how-2012-stacks-up-the-worst-
graph-on-record/)

~~~
Sprint
That 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
The 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
Also (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.

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dgesang
visualization rule #1: read the labels

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Roboprog
Excellent "enterprise" presentation skills! (and this morning's best posted
story, IMO)

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Roboprog
er, I meant "presentment", rather than "presentation".

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ttflee
Some 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.

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ttflee
What's wrong with 'The layered pie slices.'?

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sp332
Apple, at 34%, is almost as big as Google, at 89%.

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Someone
The 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
Yeah, 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.

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bachback
interesting. the anti-grammar of graphics.

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doobius
This is hilarious

