Junk Charts

The radar chart is frequently used in the following setting: you are comparing some objects across K dimensions.

Glad to see some reporter is on the case about snow ploughing in NYC after the snowstorm a couple of weeks ago.

I remain unconvinced by radar charts.

Long-time reader Chris P. sent me to an Instagram user (link) who analyzed the travel schedules of all the NCAA men's volleyball teams.

New York's subway and bus operator, MTA, has forever been facing budget crises.

Jorge Camoes featured this cheesy graphic by Eurostat in a recent Linkedin post.

The public reaction to the Consumer Reports study on Instacart's pricing strategies has forced the company to "end all item price tests," which is part of their Eversight offering.

I have been watching quite a bit of football (mostly Italy's Serie A) recently, and it's become obvious that VAR technology is ruining the beautiful game.

So many experts have been dumping on pie charts for so long that they have acquired a stench.

Standardized testing such as the SAT and ACT has attracted some relentless critics over the years.

Long-time reader Mark P. sent me to this Guardian investigation of pricing discrepancies in "dollar stores" in the U.S.

In a prior post, I discussed why the dual-axes chart about the European gambling market is mind-boggling.

One use of machine vision is to monitor road intersections to catch unruly drivers.

Long-time reader Antonio R submitted the featured chart shown above.

A jocular post by Andrew (link) sent me on an unlikely excursion.

In my previous take on "algorithmic pricing," I deliberately glossed over one nuance.

One of the oft-cited benefits of Web or mobile technology is "personalizing" the user experience.

In a prior post, I featured the above chart to tell the story of international students in the U.S.

The New York Times noted the drop in international students arriving in the U.S. in 2025 (link; paywall).

MTA (New York's subway operator) is poised to phase out the old swipe cards by the end of the year.

When you speak to any of the so-called "smart" devices, they can hear you, and perform tasks as you request them.

Screaming for attention in my twitter feed: Attila's post in which he dug up loads of pie charts from old Brazilian publications.

Farewell to the penny.

Here's the always-entertaining Avinash on data visualizations (link). tldr; He presents a (pseudo-)"algorithm" for great data visualizations.

The $2,000 per person checks "funded by tariffs" do not make sense.

Long-time reader Aleks J. sent me to this very nice statistical literacy effort, produced by a team at Tampere University and Tampere University of Applied Science in Finland (link).

You haven't seen me on Tiktok, but I'm there now, thanks to FullTake who interviewed me last week about how the government shutdown affects data collection.

What do statisticians do?

I enjoy the scatter plot published by the New York Times team about New Jersey's elections (link; paywall).

Trick or treat seems to have died in the city.

For some unclear reasons, the response rates for various instruments used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to measure the nation's well-being have been dropping .

During a recent interview, I was asked an excellent question: how does the gig economy affect the accuracy of our employment statistics?

Statista published this series of pie charts that illustrate results from a survey asking Americans what they are worried about (link).

John at the Financial Times produced the above graph, with the headline "Time on social media peaked in 2022, with young people cutting back first" (link).

Enrico Bertini has been putting out a lot of good content lately.

In a previous post, I mentioned Gelman's advice to use the ladder of abstraction to explain complex charts (link).

Long-time reader Chris P. sent me the featured column chart, through a tweet.

In the last note about my vibe coding experiment (link), I mentioned a spreadsheet that I had asked the AI to build, used to keep track of all the posts and images from the old Typepad blog.

In reviewing the New York Times's visual story anticipating the full solar eclipse in 2024 (link), I skipped over their most intricate chart.

I'm still refining my blog migration code, that is completely written by AI.

The New York Times published several beautiful pieces related to the solar eclipse in April, 2024.

I wasn't expecting to be writing about vibe coding so soon again.

One of Andrew's readers ridiculed a paper published in JAMA, one of the top peer-reviewed journals of medical science in the world, that reported some disarming statistics (link).

In this third post of the series about vibe coding, I reflect on my experiment, and speculate about its future.

Yes!

In the book blog (link), I wrote about this Bloomberg chart.

This post continues the prior post (link) about my blog archive project.

Large language models (LLMs) have evolved to the point where they become useful tools for writing computer code.

In the previous post, I looked into the new "fare-capping" scheme offered by OMNY for frequent public transit commuters in NYC.

This post is for paid members only.