Losing sleep over schedules

Fan of the blog, John H., made a JunkCharts-style post about a chart that has been picked as a "Best of" for 2014 by Fast Company (link). I agree with him. It seems more fit to be on the "Worst of" list. Here it is:

As John pointed out, the outside yellow arc (Beethoven) and the inside green arc (Simenon) present, shockingly, the same exact sleep schedule (10 pm to 6 am).

John unrolled the arcs and used R to make this version:

Go here to read John's entire post.

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Another improvement is to add a "control". One way to understand how unusual these sleep patterns are is to compare them to the average person.

I'm also a little dubious as to the reliability of this data. How do we know their sleep schedules? And how variant were their schedules?

If I rate this via the Trifecta Checkup, I'd classify this as Type DV.

 

 

Comments

[Andy Kriebel]

Here's my makeover of the same chart from back in September made with Tableau. I also include detail about what's wrong with the original chart.

http://vizwiz.blogspot.com/2014/09/genius-sleep-habits.html

[jwhendy]

Thanks for the words, Kaiser! A commenter (probably from traffic via this post) linked to his alternate take made with Tableau. He also went the scatter plot route:
- https://public.tableausoftware.com/profile/boldmayer#!/vizhome/GeniusSleep/GeniusSleep

[TML]

I don't understand people's fascination with circles. Regardless if it's a bubble graph, pie chart, or radial bar chart, it's the rare exception when one of these visualizations is the best way to display data.

All of these remakes are vast improvements over the original, but like K.F., I also question the accuracy of the data.

[OBC Indosat]

Just read about this sleep schedule infographic, and I have the same question about how they know about those schedules?