Comments on: Antibiotic Effectiveness – A Study of Chart Types

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:41:54 +0000

My ignorance is showing, but can the author or anyone cognizant explain the use of the mic’s in culture and sensitivity reports at the hospital in terms of choosing one antibiotic over another.
For instance: the S means sensitivity, as opposed to R for resistant, but the S, or SS might have <.5 S and another antibiotic might have <4 S.

What is the difference say between two sensitive antibiotics where one has <.5 or 1 or 2, versus another that has
<4, or 5 etc etc in terms of efficacy etc. What does this numerical difference above mean in terms of efficacy or complications etc.

Thank You

Mark

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:24:20 +0000

I agree that in general it’s best to avoid the connecting lines, but the alternatives are less effective. Markers without the lines are more difficult to visualize, and I abandoned the various bar chart variations before moving to the line and marker approaches.

By: Yawar Amin

Yawar Amin — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:04:51 +0000

I’m still not convinced that connecting lines between data points in categorical data is a good idea … just feels inherently wrong. Still, I’ll admit Xan Gregg’s point that it does make it easier to see obscured data points.

By: Xan Gregg

Xan Gregg — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:00:30 +0000

Nice work. I usually try to avoid connecting points on categorical scales, but your plot shows another use for such lines. It allows the reader to see where the obscured data points are.

By: Burtin Antibiotic Illustrations « FORTH GO

Burtin Antibiotic Illustrations « FORTH GO — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:51:45 +0000

[...] Peltier has a write-up of his contest entry. It has all the data of Burtin’s original in a much better rectangular [...]

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:21:52 +0000

Jaemyung -

Thank you for your comments. I have actually incorporated a couple sentences to help clarify things.

I think your question about sorting was really about how the data is sorted. There is no capability to sort data within the chart, but you can get the sorting you want in an existing chart by sorting the data upon which the chart is based. Since this specific article was less about the mechanics of making these charts, and more about how I approached the objectives of the contest, I left out a lot of the mechanical details. Other articles I write show these mechanics in much greater detail.