{"id":83,"date":"2008-11-29T11:21:50","date_gmt":"2008-11-29T16:21:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2008\/11\/29\/confusing-graphics\/"},"modified":"2008-11-29T11:23:18","modified_gmt":"2008-11-29T16:23:18","slug":"confusing-graphics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2008\/11\/29\/confusing-graphics\/","title":{"rendered":"Confusing graphics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0There’s a very confusing graphic in today’s New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"29blowlarge.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Take the last column for instance.\u00a0 It seems to say that the approval rating among blacks is 57%, and the difference between democrats and blacks is 77%.\u00a0 By using the sophisticated mathematical identity<\/p>\n

(democrats – blacks) + blacks = democrats,<\/p>\n

I find that 134% of democrats approve of stem cell research.<\/p>\n

Is just an editing error?\u00a0 Should the label “democrats minus blacks”\u00a0 just read “democrats”?\u00a0 That’s the only way I can make sense of it.<\/p>\n

As long as I’m here, I’ll whine a bit more about the Times’s choice of graphics.\u00a0 The Times magazine usually runs a small chart to illustrate a point related to the first short article in the magazine.\u00a0 It’s clear that the editor has decided that making the graph interesting-looking is more important than making it convey information.\u00a0 Here’s a particularly annoying example:<\/p>\n

\"timesmagazine1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you wanted to design a way to hide the information in a graphic, you couldn’t do much better than this.\u00a0 The whole point of the pie slices is to allow a comparison of the areas, and they’re drawn in a perspective that almost perfectly hides the areas from view.\u00a0 Where’s Edward Tufte<\/a> when you need him?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0There’s a very confusing graphic in today’s New York Times: Take the last column for instance.\u00a0 It seems to say that the approval rating among blacks is 57%, and the difference between democrats and blacks is 77%.\u00a0 By using the sophisticated mathematical identity (democrats – blacks) + blacks = democrats, I find that 134% of … Continue reading Confusing graphics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}