Junk Charts

On Twitter, Hans-Jörg Schulz put up a nice example of two charts.

We all know what happens when we click on the following news item: It's a Bloomberg article, so what else can we expect but a paywall?

An investigative article just appeared in BMJ that has important statistical content (link).

In this post, I’ll consider the visual aspects of the scatter plot previously featured here (link).

Statisticians have an eye for bias in unlikely places.

Long-time reader Chris P. sent in this confusing visualization: The goal is to depict his progress toward status in the United Mileage Plus frequent flyer programs.

Last week, the New York Times drew attention to the CTE problem in American football (link; paywall).

Andrew pointed us to someone else's investigation of an ultra-productive Chicago Business School professor named Nicholas Polson.

The chart tweeted out by Oxford Economics is made for a Junk Charts post.

Long-time reader Antonio R. sent me to this thread about plummeting subscriptions suffered by a Substack user.

I spent an hour with Claude Code, and made the following little fun app.

I'm at JSM, which is always a fantastically rich event.

Someone decided to put this dataset into a pie chart, which purportedly leads to its effective communication.

File this in the bucket of items requiring "slow thinking" ala Kahneman.

Long-time reader Antonio R. sent news about FIFA's explanation for why England's extra-time goal against Norway during the World Cup was allowed.

LLMs have become much more useful over time, and I'm happy to share some successful use cases.

This tile map I saw on a news site left me perplexed.

Reader Jean-Claude F. flagged the above chart from a German publication on Twitter as a "very, very bad graph design".

In a previous post, I discussed several chart forms that can be used to illustrate time-series data with seasonality and trending.

Long-time reader Chris P. pointed me to this informative blog post by the Energy Institute at Haas (link) that compares different ways to plot time-series data with clear seasonality.

In the game of football (i.e. soccer), players pass the ball around, and eventually someone takes a shot.

Reader Kirsten P. sent me to Ben Byrne's website (link), where we learn that Europe has the greatest countries on earth.

At the workplace, a survey went up as the New York Knicks inched closer to taking the NBA title.

This ArsTechnica story (link) will continue to recur so long as most of us, especially those of us in the U.S., ignore the forever expansion of surveillance state.

Avinash highlighted this chart by economists Saez and Zucman that paints a vivid picture of what's happening to average tax rates by income group in the U.S.

In the last post, I took a look at egg prices in the U.S., which have declined a bit in the last year but are still well above where they were five years ago.

Long-time reader Chris P. sent me to this regrettable tweet by someone who works for the Department of Labor, which collects the nation's economic data.

This New York Times article (paywall) about the President's approval ratings is a demonstration that one doesn't need fancy charts to deliver clear messages.

The official statistics continue to show that the U.S. job market is healthy (for example, here).

Back in 2022, I was noticing how many bus riders in New York were simply boarding without paying the fare (link).

Long-time reader Chris P. alerted me to a debate over climate graphs between Aaron Brown and Hank Green who have each recorded youtubes stating their positions (Brown and Green).

I return to Reuter's very strong entry in the Webby Awards.

Whether one can get into legal trouble for AI chats is something to which we should be paying attention.

Some years ago, maps of Top X came into fashion.

Long-time reader Chris P. asked me about the Webby Awards nominees for best data visualization (link).

In the last post about Clearview AI's face recognition database, I asked the rhetorical question: Have you heard a peep from Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Google, etc. about Clearview illicitly taking images from their properties?

While I was writing the posts about making paired circle charts (here, here), I came across a paradox.

A sob story (link) about a grandmother in Tennessee raises a number of issues related to use of AI tools by law enforcement.

The doping story won't stop.

In my last post, I featured the following student project that uses nested circles to compare pairs of data.

I've had a chance to look at some class projects from Ray Vella's NYU class recently.

Mark Palko sent me news that Amazon obtained an injunction against Perplexity's shopping bot (link).

I came across this infographic by the Swiss paper, Neuen Zürcher Zeitung, on my Linkedin feed (thanks, Markus Ikehata).

Prof.

Even though data and analytics are part and parcel of modern sports, it's still jarring to hear sports broadcasters invoke common statistical fallacies.

As RJ puts it, "Bellissimo"!

In a previous post, I noticed a change in the user interface of the office's coffee machine.

At the office, they swapped out the automated coffee machines.

I like to watch the Olympics as much as anyone.

Today, I take another look at the simple radar chart created for the previous post in this series.