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Florence Nightingale, Statistical Graphics Pioneer
Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightingale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightingale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers' lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. "As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change."
But conversely, if she was a man nobody would feel the need to write an article about it.
Of course they would: great people are great people, and their accomplishments stand by themselves. The difference is, if she were a man, her (uh, his) sex wouldn't be worthy of note.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe; from the little I know she seemed very capable. But conversely, if she was a man nobody would feel the need to write an article about it.
You're absolutely right, nobody would feel they had to. When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments. Two hundred years and you've just underscored how very little things have changed. When people no longer have to go out of their way to find and honor the contributions of women, when their names simply added to the book without a second thought -- then we'll have progress.
Thank you for showing us just how deeply sexism pervades our society, even amongst the most technical and literate of the population (like here, on slashdot).
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
>She made it important. It's been two centuries since then and she's still only a footnote.
I don't know about that. She was possibly one of only three important people in the history of medicine that I learned about when I was a child here in the UK. And my impression was that she was somewhat sainted (despite any lack of formal 'establishment' status); regarded as a genuine heroine to be lauded by all.
(The others were Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur).
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments.
Conversely, when a woman *is* acknowledged for her objective accomplishments, it's invariably accompanied by some mention about the tribulations she endured because of her sex, and how she didn't get "the recognition she deserved." It happens with such extreme regularity that it has become trite, and frankly speaking, counterproductive.
They've done studies which have found that signs such as "Please leave things where they are. This nature area is being destroyed by a large number of people taking souvenirs." actually *increase* vandalism, because the subconscious message is "a large number of people tak[e] souvenirs [so why don't you?]". - Humans have a tendency to look for what the group is doing and go along with it.
I'm therefore concerned when people pull out the "Women scientists aren't getting the respect they deserve, because of all the people with the perception that women aren't any good at science" argument, readers are left with the subconscious message "all the people [perceive] that women aren't any good at science".
And as far as "reputation they deserve" goes, reputation is fickle. There are a whole swath of men who did great things, yet are still unrecognized. I saw a recent blog post which was lamenting the fact that, when asked to name a women scientist, most college students name Marie Curie, with a smattering of Barbara McClintock, ignoring all the other women scientist. No one in the comments stopped to consider that when asked to name a male scientist, most would have responded Albert Einstein, with perhaps a smattering of Richard Feynman, ignoring all the other male scientists. Yet somehow gender was thought to play a major role in those other female scientists being marginalized in this example.
Keep in mind you can flip the classic XKCD comic on it's head and still have it be "How it Works": "Why don't you respect me? Is it because I suck at math?"/"Why don't you respect me? Is it because I'm a girl?"
(All this is not to say that Florence Nightingale doesn't deserve oodles of respect, or that her sex didn't cause her to be unfairly marginalized. I'm just tired of the same old arguments being wheeled out every time, distracting from substantive discussion. This thread, for instance: instead of discussing her objective accomplishments, we feel we need to bring up the role her gender played.)
Never mind the editors: what kind of imbecile spells the name wrong not once but three times when he includes a quotation which contains the correct spelling?
Except calling Obama "black" is inherently racist.
His mother is white.
His father is black.
Shouldn't that make him "half-black" or "half-white"? How about being "Kenyan-European"? Or does the European parts of his mother's heritage need to be broken out, making him "Kenyan-English-Irish-German"?
How about him just being "American", and only mention his heritage when it is relevant, like when asked where his parents were born.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I'm just going to comment on the graph itself, without connection to the person:
Presenting this kind of data - abolute numbers and their breakdown into individual contributors,
for consecutive, identical intervals of time - in a polar graph as some kind of piechart is a very bad idea.
Piecharts are good to represent relative parts of a whole, by segmenting a circle. That's it. As soon as a radial
component is included (as is the case here - it even is the main component), they become at least misleading, and I'd call it useless.
What does the radial dimension mean? Is it linear (I presume it is - but how can I be sure?)? Are we supposed to interpret
the sizes of the areas? Note that the exact same radial length leads to a much larger area on the outside of the graph than
at its center. And we tend to see areas, not lengths. Imagine the order of subnumbers switched: The area of the orange parts
("death from battlewounds") would grow considerably, while the blue area ("death from disease") would shrink quite a bit, thereby
of course reducing the point this graph tries to make. This point is actually a perfectly valid one - but trying to "sex it up"
with a misleading graph is a bad idea. Also, the segments themselves are unnecessary and don't contribute to the information:
We know months are roughly the same length each. No information gained here.
This graph is actually a very good example how not to do it. The unambiguous, easy to interpret graph to use here is a simple histogram.
"...an innovator in the use of statistical graphics..."
Really? I'd have said that she was an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to MISLEAD and 'spin' her data to enhance what she wanted to show (so in that sense, I guess she was in fact ahead of her time, the foremother of all crappy powerpoint presentations).
Why do I malign such a wonderful woman? Because her presentation is misleading and not so terribly well-presented in terms of either accuracy or simplicity.
1) while the method of graphing the data is perhaps novel in it's way of advancing over time, it's NOT USEFUL. It's finite - once you've determined the proportion each pie piece is of the circumference, that's it. If your pie pieces are going to each be 30 degrees, you get 12 data points, and that's IT...have a 13th point? Sorry, need to start another roundel (or whatever it's called) subsecting the data in ways that are at least hard to interpret and possibly misleading.
2) circular (area) presentations of linear data should always make the viewer suspicious, and this is no exception. Circular data emphasizes change in disproportional ways, as recognized and explained perfectly by Tufte. For example if you're showing your information as 'circles of relative size' but your data is implemented as the diameter of those circles, a simple doubling of the diameter actually increases the AREA of the circles (what your eye instinctively recognizes) by FOUR. So if you want to mislead people that a small increase really 'feels' quite a bit larger, circular graphs are the ticket. This is precisely what FN did here. Her goal was to show the HUGE number of 'preventable' deaths, and she did this in two ways: first, she chose the circular-presentation which exaggerates increases by ballooning the area disproportionally to the actual numeric increase. Secondly, she even further stacked the graphs, pushing preventables out to the circumference of the circle, further exaggerating the numbers because they were then stacked ATOP the death data, sneakily increasing the radius (and thus the displayed 'area') even if preventables did NOT increase.
She obviously had the best of intentions, but let's recognize this 'graph' for what it is: a very clever presentation of highly massaged data to induce an administrator to come to the conclusion desired. It's propaganda, nothing more. Well intentioned, but still propaganda.
So clearly, she's not simply the mother of the Red Cross, but the ancestor of all modern hatable powerpoint quackery to the present day.
-Styopa
It was about attacking and marginalizing a minority.
Uh ... what? I'm not even Jewish and I have to say, that's pretty far off base. I suppose you could call attempted genocide "marginalizing a minority". I suppose. Most of us would call the Holocaust by its proper name: mass murder, murder on a Biblical scale. The black population of the United States has been marginalized for a long time (less so in recent decades, perhaps) but we're not packing them into freight cars and shipping them off to be killed en masse.
And just by way of comparison, Guantanemo Bay is a detention camp and torture facility (maybe not as horrific as those maintained by many other countries, but the same in principle), not a tool of a genocidal totalitarian State. Anyone worthy of being an American citizen is horrified by what our government has done in our name in the pursuit of counter-terrorism, and wishes it would stop.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.