Junk Charts

Political theater

Jens, a long-time reader, tried to re-make the boring data tables used to report poll data.  Here is an example from USA Election Polls (left) and his enhanced version (right).

Like Jens, I find most of the tabular presentation of poll data underwhelming.  Too much data hiding all the useful information.  For example, the pollster and polling date data provide a context for super-serious poll watchers to interpret the data; however, they do not present themselves in a way that actually help readers.  Read further for versions that bring out this data much better.

Meanwhile, Jens' revision uses color and ordering to bring out the current state of affairs.  The addition of electoral votes allows us to understand the relative weight of each row, countering the weakness of the tabular format, that each row has the same height, implying erroneously that they have the same importance.

There are a number of good web-sites where this type of data is presented in attractive ways.

I have been a fan of Political Arithmetik, which made great use of the pollster and polling date data mentioned above.  Those data have been averaged to show the overall trend while the individual poll results are plotted as dots in the background.  The polling date data is embedded in the horizontal positions of the dots.  Even more impressively, the margins of error are presented.  Remarkably, this race has been a statistical tie for all these months, the 95% lower limit never quite making it above the zero level.

Another great site is fivethirtyeight.com.  Below, they essentially turned Jen's enhanced table into a map.  The legend on the right perhaps represents what they call "East Coast bias"?  All of Nathan's graphs are very attractively produced; I just wish he'd put more labels on them (such as the differentials corresponding to shades of red and blue.)

A disconnect

The Times ran a slate of graphics "analyzing" seven nights of concerts by a blogger.  On the left is one of these charts. 

I am not sure what to make of it.    All I can say is the chart designer had fun.  More on his blog.

Source: "7 Nights of Bright Eyes (in as Many Colors", New York Times, June 10, 2007

String music

I have to admit I don't understand this graphic but it looks beautiful and I leave it to you to dicipher it.  This is apparently a visualization of a piece of Western classical music in multiple dimensions using results from String Theory.

Technology Review describes how to read this particular graphic:

In the image, generated by Tymoczko's program, each ball represents a three-note chord. The farther apart the balls are, the farther the voices have to jump between chords. As a song plays, another ball moves around the cone. If it moves in a circle, a chord pattern is repeating. If it moves from the cone's tip to its base, a piece is progressing toward dissonance.

Dimitri has many more, and has been featured in Science, Time, New Scientist, etc. etc.

Source: "Seeing Music", Technology Review, Sept 8 2006.

 

 

Pre-holiday Rock & Roll

Continuing our mid-week entertainment series, thanks to Mike E.-L. for sending this in.