Maybe This Information is Beautiful, It's Just Not Accurate

This is an image from the e-book Information is Beautiful from the site of the same name. But they've made the same mistake that has long served to help people learn How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.  The graphic below, from Huff's book, shows the comparison of bags of money representing an average weekly wages from two countries. The one on the right earning twice as much as the one on the left. Showing how to lie, the bags are drawn so that the on the right is twice as tall as the one on the left, but this doesn't give us the correct visual image, since the graphic artist has doubled both the height and the width to produce the image on the right. The resulting visual impression is that the bag on the right is four times the one on the right. A perfect image to mislead.

Now the graphic from Information is Beautiful purports to represent the percentage of children in poverty. On the left is shown a small shadow silhouette of a young child with arms raised that represents 2%, the percentage of children in poverty in Denmark. Compare this with the larger silhouette for Germany representing 10%. Even in this flat 2-d outline more than 5 of the Denmark outlines could fit in the Germany outline.  The problem, of course, is that a graphic artist has lied again and doubled both the height and width of the silhouettes to represent these numbers. This distorts any comparisons that could be made with these data. And it gets worse, since we are to understand these are images of 3-dimensional children!

I recall decades ago this, now classic graphic, when it appeared in the Washington Post. The same mistake of displaying data using the same error with the same methods (compare the Eisenhower dollar with the Carter dollar). You would think....

Curry Free Throws vs Suspected Terrorist Gun Buys

A comparison by Zachary Crockett from Vox: a suspected terrorist can buy a gun more easily than Steph Curry can make a free throw. Via Visual News.

Puzzling World

Here is a busy graphic representing the composition of the world's economy. Countries are given polygonal sections proportional to the relative size of their economies. Each sector is divided into three smaller regions: Most lightly colored is Agriculture, somewhat darker is Industry, darker yet, the sub-segment that is greatest for most countries, is Services. Starting with the largest (US) the polygons seem to be arranged in a rough Pareto-chart fashion from largest to smallest in a counter-clockwise fashion. Although, individual countries are hard to locate, those of similar size contributions are somewhat easy to compare. I found it fun to puzzle out comparisons that I found surprising, for example, US industry has about the same area as China's. Mathew Yglesias from Vox points out others:

You can see some cool things here.

• For example, compare the US and China. Our economy is much larger than theirs, but our industrial sectors are comparable in size, and China’s agriculture sector looks to be a little bit larger. Services are what drive the entire gap.

• The UK and France have similarly sized overall economies, but agriculture is a much bigger slice of the French pie.

• For all that Russia gets played up as some kind of global menace, its economy produces less than Italy. Put all the different European countries together, and Russia looks pathetic.

• You often hear the phrase “China and India,” but you can see here that the two Asian giants are in very different shape economically.

• The only African nation on this list, South Africa, has a smaller economy than Colombia.

This graphic has gotten criticism as being too busy, too unorganized, and too difficult to make comparison, among others. But I do like the puzzle-it-out quality of the graphic. It makes us work a little to understand and make comparisons. I especially like the quote from Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science:

Paradoxically, the best thing about this graph may also be its worst: Its tricky, puzzle-like characteristic (it even looks like some sort of hi-tech jigsaw puzzle) makes it hard to read, hard to follow, but at the same time gratifying for the reader who goes to the trouble of figuring it out.

From howmuch, via Vox, via SM,CS and SS. 

Circles of Coal

 

Graphic from the print edition of the Washington Post on August 2, 2015 showing what proportion of a state's total electricity that comes from the burning of coal. Each state's circle represents 100% of the states electricity production. The inner black circle represents the percentage of the total electricity that is produced by coal. This is a nice display, but correctly interpreting such percentages from circles is difficult. Assessing "a lot" or "a little" is somewhat easy, but even correctly divining the 50% value, is something many find difficult and even counter-intuitive.

High school geometry likely taught you that an inner circle half the size of an outer circle is found by inscribing a square inside the outer circle and then inscribing an inner circle inside the square. This inner circle will have half the area of the outer circle.

The geometry is correct, but visually interpreting this black circle as half the area of the outer circle can be difficult. Shaded areas of squares might have worked better in the coal graphic. The Washington Post has more maps on other methods of electricity generation here.

Belated Shark Week

Sharks seem to be a beach menace this summer from North Carolina beaches, South African surf competitions, to TV movies.

But for some perspective, above is a dramatic, graphic comparison of the number of people killed by sharks per year and number of sharks killed by people PER HOUR. About 12 people are killed by sharks each year, and over 11,000 sharks are killed PER HOUR by people. The image above is just the beginning of a long graphic scroll of shark death. Here is the bottom of the graphic:

Via: visualnews.

Of course some folks have devised their own shark protection.

Yakkity Yak...

Here is a larger view of the infographic from Alberto Lucas López showing the fascinating worldwide diversity of spoken languages. From the Infographic:

There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people. We represent each language within black borders and then provide the numbers of native speakers (in millions) by country. The colour of these countries shows how languages have taken root in many different regions.

E-Evil Almonds

Almonds have lately become the enemy of freshwater, thanks to comparisons published by a Mother Jones article, "California's Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as Los Angeles Uses in Three Years". It seems we should all feel guilty for enjoying them. Prompted by these surprising comparisons, the LATimes maps out other foods "From steak to mangoes, here are some water-hogging foods."

Amazingly, they left out almonds! Nathan Yau at Flowingdata puts almonds on the map saying:

The LA Times article quotes about one gallon of water per almond. According to the Google, the average almond weighs 1.2 grams, which translates to about 24 almonds per ounce. Therefore, 24 gallons of water per ounce, placing almonds between mangos and asparagus from a per ounce perspective. 

Looking at this graphic,  it's perhaps beef that we should stay away from!