Dustin Smith’s World Opinions on Climate Change article in Chart Porn blog pointed me to an attractive but ultimately ineffective graphic. The road to Copenhagen Summit on Whatype blog presents results of a 2007 World Public Opinion survey of worldwide public sentiment over global warming-related issues. The graphic is reproduced in small size below; click [...]

A Bar-of-Pie Chart. And a Pie-of-Pie Chart may be even worse. Let the Chart Busters explain.
Last week, Excel guru John Walkenbach conducted a poll on his wildly popular J-Walk Blog asking people to Post Your Pet. The poll results were tabulated in Tabulating The Pets.
I know John’s an expert and all, and he [...]

Blown Saves vs. Fielding Independent Pitching shows the following chart comparing Blown Saves to FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) for ten relief pitchers on the MLB teams that made the 2009 playoffs. Fielding Independent Pitching is a quantity designed to remove the effect of fielding on a pitcher’s statistics.

This is the wrong chart type for a [...]

Another baseball-related post today, and again I’m highlighting Justin Bopp’s Beyond the Box Score blog. And no, Justin, I’m not picking on you, I just have an alternative way to show the same information. In Introducing DiamondView Composite Player Evaluation, Justin describes a technique for graphing a player’s capabilities in four skill categories, on a [...]

Over on Beyond the Box Score, Justin Bopp has treated us to a graphical analysis of attendance at major league baseball stadiums. Beyond the Box Score is a blog about baseball that follows the SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) tradition, which involves intensive statistical analysis. About the time physicists refine their Theory of Everything, [...]

Last spring, FastCompany published an analysis of National Public Radio, which has taken off in the past decade. Will NPR Save the News? discussed NPR’s revenues and compared its audience with that of two other major news outlets, newspapers and television news.
Yeah, NPR is great and all, I even listen occasionally. But this is a [...]

This is a small entry in the Chart Busters series. I received a request for something which was mechanically possible, but which was not visually desirable.
I was asked whether a certain type of chart could be done. The data was weekly sales of 14 products, but the user wanted to show only the top ten [...]

In Whacky Graphics at USAspending.gov, Seth Grimes of Intelligent Enterprise (another Seth G) deconstructs a pie chart showing Federal Spending FY 2009 on USAspending.gov’s interactive dashboard. As Seth says, this is “one downright whacky graphic. I can’t recall the last time I saw a graphic that so distorted the numbers, so I tried to [...]

In the wake of the Mark Sanford scandal, in which the South Carolina governor was accused of hiking in the Andes with his mistress or something, political blog FiveThirtyEight has published results of surveys about Sanford in Should Sanford Resign?. I was pointed to the FiveThirtyEight survey results by Andrew Gelman in Doing graphics the [...]

I got a workbook from Dick Kusleika that he thought would be a good candidate for Chart Busters. Basically it’s his sales staff, with their sales and commissions figures. He uses a couple pie charts to compare the salesmen, in terms of sales, commissions, and relative commissions (normalized by sales). Dick describes the process:
1. I [...]