Statistical Graphics and more

Following the news and trying to understand what is going on in the “EU debt crisis” is a hard job and maybe a good visualization can help. At first sight the BBC did it. Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom? shows nicely how the relation between the most “interesting” debtors and creditors in the [...]

This was not meant to be a Good & Bad, but it turned out, that the argument is most effective, when it goes beyond pure criticism and actually offers alternative – so we need a Good. We find this nice illustration of German energy data at the GE visualization site: This kind of visualization is [...]

This time it is easy to make a point; not because of my improvement advise being so well thought and fine tuned – no, just because “The Bad” is so convincingly bad. You find it here at slideshare, called “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report”. Figure 1 on page 10 looks like this: I would [...]

This post could as well be called “Which Smartphone is right for you?”, or “Plotting conditional distribution – but the right way!”. Here is the original visualization from Nielsen, which is not really bad, but still hides the important message to some extent. Kaiser adequately pointed out that some features – important features – of [...]

We definitely live in a world of overflowing information – certainly more than a human can and wants to digest. Of course, the internet is the principal motor for this, but it also happens with the design of simple everyday’s things. Antrepo has a nice example of how product designs can be reduced to what [...]

I recently got my current Miles & More balance. As you might guess, I am not really a frequent flyer, at least not with Lufthansa and its allies. According to the numbers, I need 36.000 miles resp. 30 flight segments to get Frequent Traveller status. Given my currently 1.500 miles resp. 4 segments, I am [...]

This is quite an unusual Good & Bad posting, as it does not refer to some extraordinarily bad graph, but just wants to show some additional aspects of a dataset, compared to the original visualization found on Kaiser’s Junk Charts. The comments on Kaiser’s post mainly picked on the variability of ranks, such that I [...]

The last regular issue of “The Good & the Bad” dates back to [11/2006], so it is more than time to post. I found this flowchart on Kaiser’s junkchart. The graph was originally posted on the Internet Monk‘s blog – the data comes from a study, which can be found here. There was no data [...]

Peter Huber referred to “the rawness of raw data”, a kind of data we would not expect to find in a textbook. The book of Fahrmeir and Tutz on multivariate modelling refers to the visual impairment data from Liang et al., 1992 in table 3.12: Nothing wrong here at first sight; but how would you [...]

On an Apple related list I found a pointer to this price comparison chart. Although the author already put a disclaimer in his post that this graph was not intended to be “mathematically correct”, it is amazing how badly the actually information is hidden behind the rainbow chart. Using a simple barchart just does not [...]

After getting the data together which was used to generate the visualization criticized in this post, it is just fair to prepare a better version. Tom Carden already showed some quick graphs which improve the initial “pie chart“. Note that I only show the 7 most relevant diseases and grouped the rest into one group [...]

Robert has a very long and profound post on this chart: The whole interactive thing can be found here on the GE site. It seems to be a bit of a provocation that Ben Fry’s company uses a tattered pie chart to visualize the data, which is definitely better visualized in a line-chart (i.e., a [...]