According to Do You Know What Planned Parenthood Actually Does?, “the Susan G. Komen Foundation has announced they will stop funding Planned Parenthood for breast cancer exams and other breast-health services.” MoveOn.Org attributes this action on pressure from the Republican Party, because of their stance on abortion and on the abortion practices of Planned Parenthood. Planned [...]

Someone tweeted a link to a bad pie chart. I forget who it was: if it was you, let me know in the comments and I’ll give you credit here. But it’s not merely a bad pie chart, it’s an awful pie chart. A wonderful, awful pie chart. And the Grinch got a wonderful, awful [...]

Worst Pie Chart Ever? The other day I encountered a tweet with a common theme: “Worst Pie Chart Ever.” So I had to follow the link. It was an article in Atlantic Cities, 2011 Major League Baseball Regular Season: Attendance by Team, which stated that combined attendance at all Major League Baseball (MBL) games was fifth [...]

I’ve been corresponding frequently with Paresh Shah (Visual Quest blog). Unlike me, Paresh is rather a fan of circular charts, as we learned from his comments under the recent ChartBusters post, Reworking a New York Times Box of Donuts. Paresh did point out to me, and has since blogged about, a circular chart he doesn’t [...]

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a series of articles investigating payoffs by Biotronik, a medical device manufacturer, to doctors at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, leading to Biotronik cornering that hospital’s market of pacemakers and defibrillators. The story in Tipping the Odds for a Maker of Heart Implants was accompanied by [...]

Remember the cardinal rule about bar charts and axis scales? Because we judge the values in a bar chart by the lengths of the bars, not by the positions of the ends of the bars, the axis scale must include zero. By chopping off the bottoms of the bars, we increase the resolution of the [...]