Archive for 'Chart Busters'
Charting NBC Olympic Coverage
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
My friend Jimmy of Code for Excel and Outlook twittered about a chart on TechCrunch that showed the general online assessment of the Olympic coverage by NBC. How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown shows an analysis of nearly 20,000 tweets and 5,700 blog posts. The highlight of this analysis is the following [...]
Posted: Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 15
Reforming a Health Care Reform Chart
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
While in line at the bank last week, I picked up a copy of the Worcester MA Telegram and Gazette, and stuck in the middle of the front section I saw a chart showing how much a family of four would have to pay for health care for the three health reform plans under debate. [...]
Posted: Monday, March 1st, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 8
Monthly And Cumulative Spending Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
The Chart Porn blog referred me to an attractive but remarkably ineffective chart, in UK Quantitative Easing. The chart appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian, and shows the “money injected into the UK economy by the British government to help ease the recession.” [cite] This illustration is reduced to fit; click on this image [...]
Posted: Monday, February 15th, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 72
Extra Distortion in a Pie Chart
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
148Apps recently treated us to a fancy pie chart in Apple iTunes App Store Metrics, Statistics and Numbers for iPhone Apps which demonstrated how easy it is, if you’re not satisfies with how much a 3D pie chart can distort data, to add extra distortion. If ever there was a job for Chart Busters, this [...]
Posted: Friday, February 5th, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 7
Dating Site Photo Effectiveness
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Kaiser of JunkCharts has posted twice in a couple days about some charts that compare the effectiveness of different profile photo topics, in terms of attracting a potential date. The article that led to the controversy is The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures on a site called OK Cupid. Kaiser posted first in Light [...]
Posted: Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 10
Use Dot Plots for Better Categorical Comparisons
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
In Yikes! Another Pie Horror Show, I was showing problems with yet another pie chart. I know the criticism of pie charts getting tiresome, but I wanted to respond to a comment by Jeff Weir:
Q: What’s worse than comparing categories within a pie chart?
A: Comparing categories between 2 pie charts.
I will use an article [...]
Posted: Friday, January 29th, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 20
Yikes! Another Pie Horror Show
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
My friend Debra Dalgleish notified me the other day that it was National Pie Day.
I missed National Pie Day, but while reading The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail, I encountered a pie chart that gave me indigestion. It purports to show problems with inter-cultural relationships that lead to outsourcing failures.
Posted: Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 12
Graphing The Cost of Health Care
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
My friend and colleague John Walkenbach pointed me to a post from National Geographic called The Cost of Care, which compared health care spending with life expectancy for a number of countries. John asked how I would display this data.
The article shows a line chart with a line connecting a country’s health care spending on [...]
Posted: Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 28
Better Chart of the Day
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
I often read the Chart of the Day feature on the Silicon Alley Insider. It’s kind of a pop look at something relevant to the technology industry. The charts are a bit more cerebral and way less chart junkie than those in USA Today, and I like to just have a peek to make sure [...]
Posted: Thursday, December 17th, 2009 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 15
Comparison of Search Share, September and October 2009
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
The Marketing Charts blog compared Google to the rest of the world in Online Search Share, September 2009 & October 2009. The “guidelines” were followed: for parts of a whole, use a pie chart. And for comparison, why not two pies side by side?
Well, as Edward Tufte once said, “The only thing worse than a [...]
Posted: Monday, November 30th, 2009 under Chart Busters.
Comments: 10
















