Statistical Graphics and more

Maybe it is a bit too harsh to talk of the “most useless map”, but when I saw this map on the greek bail-out referendum this morning in the FAZ, this was what first came to my mind Well, yes the vote was without any doubt against the suggestion of the EU to solve the […]

Yes, it’s been a while since the last post, but hey – isn’t it a good sign that I presumably do not stumble over too bad graphics every day (or I just might not have the time to write about it …) This example comes from SAS’s online manual on their Visual Analytics tool. And […]

On the JMP blog you find a post which uses the same data source I took for my first attempt to visualize the web of the EU debt. I found it hard to really make a point with this data. Looking at the JMP post tells me I wasn’t all too bad. Let’s walk through […]

Looking for a map of the french Departments, I came across this map of the population density of France on Departments level which can be found on Wikipedia – and you may guess: this is this month’s “The Bad”. At first sight there seems to be a contradiction between the apparently continuous color scale (see […]

Following the news and trying to understand what is going on in the “EU debt crisis” is a hard job and maybe a good visualization can help. At first sight the BBC did it. Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom? shows nicely how the relation between the most “interesting” debtors and creditors in the […]

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 […]

This time it is easy to make a point; not because of my improvement advise being so well thought and fine tuned – no, just because “The Bad” is so convincingly bad. You find it here at slideshare, called “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report”. Figure 1 on page 10 looks like this: I would […]

This post could as well be called “Which Smartphone is right for you?”, or “Plotting conditional distribution – but the right way!”. Here is the original visualization from Nielsen, which is not really bad, but still hides the important message to some extent. Kaiser adequately pointed out that some features – important features – of […]

We definitely live in a world of overflowing information – certainly more than a human can and wants to digest. Of course, the internet is the principal motor for this, but it also happens with the design of simple everyday’s things. Antrepo has a nice example of how product designs can be reduced to what […]

I recently got my current Miles & More balance. As you might guess, I am not really a frequent flyer, at least not with Lufthansa and its allies. According to the numbers, I need 36.000 miles resp. 30 flight segments to get Frequent Traveller status. Given my currently 1.500 miles resp. 4 segments, I am […]

This is quite an unusual Good & Bad posting, as it does not refer to some extraordinarily bad graph, but just wants to show some additional aspects of a dataset, compared to the original visualization found on Kaiser’s Junk Charts. The comments on Kaiser’s post mainly picked on the variability of ranks, such that I […]

The last regular issue of “The Good & the Bad” dates back to [11/2006], so it is more than time to post. I found this flowchart on Kaiser’s junkchart. The graph was originally posted on the Internet Monk‘s blog – the data comes from a study, which can be found here. There was no data […]