Sunday, Sunday

Along with reading the Sunday newspaper, CBS Sunday Morning is a favorite in our household. Click on the video above for a short report on a streaming pay TV customer satisfaction survey conducted by JD Power. The report mentions four categories: "cord cutters", those who have cancelled TV service, "cord nevers", those who have never subscribed to pay TV and only subscribe to a streaming video service, "cord shavers", those who still subscribe but now to a downgraded TV service, and "cord stackers", those who keep pay TV but also use streaming.  From the report:

The inaugural study measures overall satisfaction among customers who have used a subscription- or transaction-based streaming video service within the past six months. The study measures customer satisfaction by examining six key measures (listed in order of importance): performance and reliability; content; cost of service; ease of use; communication; and customer service. Scores for each measure are reflected in an index based on a 1,000-point scale.

The measures for "cutters", "nevers", "shavers", and "stackers" are 802, 807, 822, and 826. Here is a frame from late in the video that reports on the right most bar "stackers" as it relates to the other categories."

It's clear that that Sunday Morning is in sore need of knowledgeable graphics editors. Perhaps their artists make their charts telegenic by filling them up with what we would call "chart junk", but in ignoring the proper representation of the data, they are presenting false and misleading images. The numbers are said to be represented here, are again, 802, 807, 822, and 826. The second bar from left almost looks twice as tall as the left-most bar and not a bar that should only be about 0.6% taller. The third bar from the left looks about 3 times taller than the left-most bar and it should only be about 2.5% taller. Finally, the right-most "cord stackers" bar should be under 3% taller, not over 4 times taller! Yes, they give a grid background to judge the sizes, but they are misleading sizes to judge. The 'smiley' satisfaction faces are probably the most reliable description of the data: The satisfaction scores are amazingly the same. From smallest to largest they vary by less than 3%.

Here are the data shown on the graph and then a more accurate rendering (without the chart junk).

Not much difference in satisfaction across all type customers.

Flag Graphics

Design agency ferdio has put together graphics illustrating the design, colors, and symbols of national flags. Patterns, layouts, ages etc. are collected together in what they have call Flag Stories. Above is one such story of flags stacked into a bar chart showing the frequencies of the number of colors in the flags. As they mention, over a third of countries favor flags with three or four colors. You can find many more at Flag Stories. We've seen flag colors before.

How to lie, no, display data in context

These are figures from the classic book "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff. They illustrate an admonition against a dramatic scaling of a line graph (and also a bar graph) by not including zero on the vertical axis. This omission has long been a staple of those who want to mislead but, as the video from Vox below explains, often for their graphs, or charts as they call them, it is not always wrong to omit zero. Seeing the data in context is what's important. I especially like the illustration of plotting body temperature on the Kelvin scale. We should keep in mind the phrase attributed to the late Harvard statistician Frederick Mosteller, "While it is easy to lie with statistics, it is even easier to lie without them."

X is for .... oh just forget it!

Journalist David Goldenberg of Five Thirty Eight noted the animals most likely used to represent letters in a sample of 50 children's ABC books from 1820 to 2013. He notes that Zebra was used almost exclusively for the letter "Z". But  note the letter "X". So few words begin with "X" that it was most often totally omitted from alphabet books or as Goldenberg says used by authors, "lamely trotting out a fox or an ox and pointing out its last letter." The modern trend seems to be using scientific words such as Xiphias for swordfish.  

Shown these results, one parent mentioned that Xenops, a genus of ovenbirds, was used in at least two of her son's items (books or toys) and was surprised that "D" for dolphin was not higher in the ranking. But I guess it's hard to top Dog and Duck. And Dr. Susess's ABC Book, for the letter D, dreams up a Duck-Dog!

World's Deadliest Animals

From Bill Gates via datavizblog. I guess it's time for the Discovery Channel to have an annual Mosquito Week in place of this week's Shark Week.

Note the caption that says, "All calculations have wide error margins".

Most Pleasant Places

Designer and software engineer Kelly Norton has produced a map to find the greatest number of pleasant days in the year around the continental US. Her definition:

“pleasant” here means the mean temperature was between (55° F and 75° F), the minimum temperature was above 45° F, the maximum temperature was below 85° F and there was no significant precipitation or snow depth.

You can roll the cursor over the map and reveal bar charts of the number of pleasant days by month. Although it may be positively correlated with temperature, I think a big omission from this definition of "pleasant" is a measure of humidity.

kellegous.com via flowingdata.com

Six Decades of Most Popular Girls Names by US State

Animated maps showing the most popular girls names from 1960 to 2012. There are some quick country-wide shifts from one year to the next. Consider Lisa in 1969 and Jennifer in 1970.

Happiness in Negative Space

This image is from an Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia exhibit called The Happy Show by Stefan Sagmeister that just ended its tour at the Institute of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Pacific Design Center. In this display, included in the exhibit, people were instructed to select one gumball from column that indicated their level of happiness (1 to 10). The bar chart of the happiness level of those that participated is shown in the negative space above each column, showing how many gumballs were removed. Median happiness here looks to be about a 7. We've seen a similar exhibit before.

Aggregated Images of Emotions

What colors are most often associated with various emotions? A bar chart. Plus, aggregation of drawings of answers to the question: Do your emotions have directions? If yes, draw arrows. From Emotionally Vague. See also What Color is PG-13?.

Election References

A display of the frequency of references to the candidates.

Interactive Bar Chart

Here is an interactive bar chart in a museum where people take tokens depending on how they answer a question. The frequencies of their responses can be seen as the columns get diminished with each selection.