Bad Graphs www.idblog.org/images/infoweek11-24-2.gif Note inconsistent scaling along the horizontal axis when comparing the two graphs side by side. The bars on the left graph are only half as long as those on the right. www.stat.columbia.edu/.../archives/JSMmap.jpg Ugly, hard to read, colors/designs have no sense of “less to more”, why do it this way when a simple bar chart would have sufficed?www.nathannewman.org/log/healthcoverage.gif Overkill… two bars? No graph needed at all, just state the drop in coverage as a pair of figures or a percentage drop from one to the next. http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm A classic example of conflating size with area. The 1978 dollar (bottom) should be just 44% the size of the 1958 dollar (top). However, the areas show the smaller dollar is only about 20% the size of the top dollar. The facts are the 1978 dollar has 44% of the purchasing power of the 1958 dollar, but our eyes see the smaller dollar and think the purchasing power is much less.http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm Do you have any idea what the vertical axis represents? If so, let me know. http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm The 3-d effect and scaling (foreshortening) render this graph nearly unreadable. The air force wedge (26%) actually looks larger than the navy wedge (27%), when it should be the other way around. 3-d is always a bad idea.http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/images/phillips1.jpg (both) Way too much fancy artwork, the message is lost. How does Britain compare to Canada, for example? The lines “mingle”. Hard to keep track which is
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