{"id":1289,"date":"2011-12-02T22:40:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T20:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2011-12-08T08:23:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T06:23:04","slug":"the-good-the-bad-122011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/the-good-the-bad-122011\/","title":{"rendered":"The Good & the Bad [12\/2011]"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

We find this nice illustration<\/a> of German energy data at the GE visualization site<\/a>:
\n\"\"<\/a>This kind of visualization is quite common now and had its “initial public offering” with “The Baby Name Wizard<\/a>” by Martin Wattenberg. The stacked display has some issues (which can make it to “a Bad”) and it takes a careful construction to make sure it is well readable (it actually “only” needs the right stacking order – if there is one). What struck me with above graphics was the fact, that none of the bands is actually aligned at some sort of straight base – typically the x-axis in a plot. As a consequence it is really hard to tell the story behind the data. Most frustrating, the most recent data is extremely jiggling which makes a judgement of the current trend almost impossible.<\/p>\n

It took me a while to get the data<\/a> out of the visualization, but you can actually download the whole visualization here<\/a>. My first attempt to understand the data better was using simple time series which I created by “misusing” a parallel coordinate plot:
\n\"\"<\/a>What we lose is the total, as the series are no longer stacked – though, it was quite hard to judge the total in the original visualization as well. The barchart is used as a reference and shows the most recent distribution. What can we learn from this graph:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Well, there was the oil crisis in 1973 – God knows what would have happened without the crisis stopping this ridicules greed for oil in the early 70s.<\/li>\n
  2. The second oil crisis in 1979 was actually having a real impact, as the decline in oil consumption lasted for four years and since then stayed on a lower level – quite contrary to the crisis in 1973.<\/li>\n
  3. Germany abandoned half of the brown coal sources shortly after the reunification.<\/li>\n
  4. Nuclear energy stalled in 2000 and is now on a (projected) decline.<\/li>\n
  5. Renewable energy sources are the only ones with a significant growth, but it still takes a long way to supersede oil and gas.<\/li>\n
  6. Coal is declining steadily.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    You certainly can read off all the topics from the GE-visualization, but you probably would need to know these fact before, which is certainly the wrong way, as a visualization should generate insight and not visualize already existing knowledge.<\/p>\n

    PS: I tried to find a good stacking order, but after 30min. moving series up and down it looked like there is none.<\/p>\n

    PPS: There is a quite similar post here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-good-the-bad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1289"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1319,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions\/1319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}