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Calling Out GE's Misleading Data Visualizations
theodp writes "Stephen Few never did suffer data visualization fools gladly. After seeing an oil exec (mis)use data viz to put a positive spin on Gulf Oil Spill cleanup efforts, Few felt compelled to call out BP. And now it's General Electric that's got Few's dander up: 'The series of interactive data visualizations that have appeared on GE's website over the last two years,' writes Few, 'has provided a growing pool of silly examples. They attempt to give the superficial impression that GE cares about data while in fact providing almost useless content. They look fun, but communicate little. As such, they suggest that GE does not in fact care about the information and has little respect for the intelligence and interests of its audience. This is a shame, because the stories contained in these data sets are important.' Concerned about his strong reactions to poorly designed data visualizations, Few asked his neuropsychologist wife whether he might be overreacting. She, too, agrees that GE's natural gas visualizations are maddening, which one might be tempted to dismiss as predictable, although Eyeo Festival presenter Michal Migurski also declares GE's effort 'one terrible, terrible bit of nonsense.'"
The legend is far too visually prominent.
If you can't find anything of substance to say, attack the visual. lul.
What's good for GE is good for America.
Can somebody please translate the summary into English? What the fuck do phrases like "never did suffer data visualization fools gladly" and "got Few's dander up" mean?
+1
No. Learn to speak American.
LRN2English. I f you don't like the way someone writes, don't get you panties in a wad. Whining about having to think a little drops your geek score drastically,
"never did suffer data visualization fools gladly" == "Few despises bad charts"
"got Few's dander up" == "Few lost patience."
Recommendation: steer clear of the writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. There is a difference between business English and literary English.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Stupid, Yes, We allow these corporations to run over us, feed us bullshit and generally lie to everyone.
One thing you have to remember. Corporations are run by people, not machines. People are intrinsically evil.
They enjoy screwing others and cannot be trusted, That is really sad.
After looking at the various visualizations the only one that is worth anything is the third one that shows the years of remaining reserves for each of the fossil fuels. Even that one isn't that impressive. Also I don't get the use of the Sierpinski triangle, Apollonian gasket, and Sierpinski carpet style shapes for representing each fuel source. I haven't looked at much data visualization, but it doesn't seem the use of these doesn't add anything.
Time to offend someone
Since the summary is so difficult to understand, the jist of the article is that GE's visualisations (I will not grace them with the title "graph") are completely useless in comparing datasets, and are completely confusing to use. This seems to indicate that GE (like many companies) like to fiddle with the presentation of data to push their agenda. (Shock, Horror!) Sadly, this case is an insult to good design principles and statisticians everywhere.
but GE is Evil.
Jeff Immelt is Satan.
I've lived and traveled throughout the United States of America, and I'm pretty sure that no American would write that way. You wouldn't hear such phrases used in places like California, New York, Colorado, Washington, Maine, or in the mid-western states.
Admittedly, I have never visited the Confederate States of America. Why would I want to visit a third-world country like that? That's the only conceivable place where such language might be used, due to the broken grasp of the English language by people living in places like Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. That would contradict what you're saying, however. They aren't American, and thus can't be speaking American English.
Holy crap is this guy over-reacting. (and his wife). OH NOES THEY ARE PUTTING ATTRICTVE GRFICS UP WITH THE INFOS!!!1 oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals oh noes capitals
WTF slashdot? How is 'pr8mrose' 'primrose'? You are fucking stupid.
I have absolutely no idea what the summary is about - it makes no sense and there is no context...
At first I was thinking that this story was about GE trying to push its agenda or doing something evil. But I RTFA and this is actually about this guy complaining that people are using the wrong type of chart and making poor design decisions. The big punch is that his wife agrees with him.
I am so shaken up by this story, I know I will get all nervous the next time I insert SmartArt charts in Powerpoint - I would be so ashamed to end up publicly flogged on this guy's strongly-worded blog...
Reminds me of a former coworker who is spending his evenings writing blog entries about companies that dare use Arial instead of Helvetica on their websites.
lucm, indeed.
...then perhaps we'd better not even get started on the quality of the underlying data.
The sole purpose of corporations providing information is to convince the public of something that will benefit the company. From inception to design through data collection, analysis and reporting there is a defined marketing objective and it never involved "let's find out". Yet we treat with less scepticism than reports from an independent academic that at least in theory has survived a thorough peer review - though even that tends to assumes the technical parameters operated were correct. How often do you see reference to, say, questionnaires in the methodology which then goes on to even let you see a copy of the questionnaire?
Try fiddling with the knobs at the bottom. Only the size of the enclosing circle, square, and triangle are the data. While the stuff inside might allow the viewer to think there's more data, the page doesn't actually claim that whitespace vs. blue are related to the number.
I don't know whether that makes it worse or better, but I think it may give GE too much credit to think that they're even /trying/ to convey information.
Normally, I'd agree with you. However, as a New Yorker, I can tell you that these phrases are used (or at least known) in the coastal Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, MD). I can't say one way or the other how a New Englander might react, because I've never been out that way (except for a brief foray into Boston once). It's not something that we commonly use, but we understand the idiom. Whether that's from linguistic evolution or global telecommunications, I don't know. I didn't have any trouble understanding the summary, but I find the guy's ire a bit perplexing. He got mad because someone made a misleading visualization? He's going to have a heart attack at 40.
I've lived and traveled throughout the United States of America, and I'm pretty sure that no American would write that way. You wouldn't hear such phrases used in places like California, New York, Colorado, Washington, Maine, or in the mid-western states.
I find it interesting that I could read that summary with no problems even when I'm not a native English speaker. Perhaps you should read a bit more, because I have read people from those "places" use those phrases. By the way, an interesting link about getting your dander up.
[I don't] suffer fools gladly is a crude way of pointing out that you're an arrogant douchebag.
dander is redneck slang for anger.
Und dan wie TANZEN mit unsererer GM monkie !!
Heil !!
I don't know, man. There really are a lot of fools doing a lot of damage. After a while even the most non-arrogant can get tired of it. Mainly because fools don't understand the virtue of confining the results of their decisions to themselves.
I love how the submitter tries to validate his submission with a paper that has "social justice" in the first paragraph. What a load of crap.
Off to slam Comic Sans, laters.
They just described 95% of the internet and 99% of what people do with computers these days. There used to be a time when computers where made by serious people to be used by serious people to solve serious problems. Now we don't. You're the ones who wanted that, deal with it, geeks.
NO! Either you put up with shit like you are supposed to, or you are ARROGANT. It's simple you stupid ARROGANT douche!
.. I reach for my revolver, because it means that they want to impose their view on me and consider themselves justified in doing so.
Justice equals law equals the desire to use force. Otherwise they would talk about 'social suggestions' instead.
Why? The summary, aside from the spelling, was perfectly valid idiomatic English. No need to learn some colonial dialect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures. (Here's his website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )
The problem is not that the data presented are not useful, or that they're deliberately intended to deceive, which we could fault GE for. As I see it, the problem is that the graphs themselves are crap. They hide useful information, and they use shape and color in ways that seem to provide information but don't, and in general they focus on the aesthetic appeal of the charts at the expense of the data.
When I first encountered McCandless's site a few years ago, I really loved it, but as time goes on it's begun to piss me off. For example, his chart on relative radiation risks:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/
Logarithmic charts are always difficult to explain to the public, but the triangular shape of his graph makes it even worse, suggesting a linear increase in dose. He compares it to XKCD's chart, but his version is inferior in every way. XKCD uses color and shape to provide information; in McCandless's version color and shape have negative information content.
Another example: a graph of time travel plots in film and TV (minus Dr. Who):
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/
The curvy lines look nice, but all anyone can make out of this is a confusing snarl of lines too tangled to parse. Once again, shape has negative information content in this image.
But the king of the bad visualizations is probably another graph McCandless did for GE:
http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/co2/#/flights_London_Tokyo
Here, there's no way to intercompare various quantities, and figure out which of two choices is bigger. Shape, color and position are once again meaningless or misleading (things are shown the same size even when they're 8x different), quantities are in incompatible units, and worst of all some of the numbers are flat-out wrong (for instance, fuel usage of aircraft).
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
Didn't stop them from losing tens of billions of dollars in the financial meltdown, but GE is a big fan of Forced Ranking: "Jack Welch, General Electric's former CEO, is often associated with a 20-70-10 distribution: the top 20 percent is rewarded for best performance, the middle 70 percent is rated 'average' and the bottom 10 percent is coached for improvement. The 'rank-and-yank' system, also associated with Jack Welch, automatically terminates employees in the bottom category, allowing organizations to purge the worst performers."
Pac-Man meets Tic-Tac-Toe: "Though the GE/McKinsey Matrix is more sophisticated than the BCG matrix and can provide higher value information for the executive management, it has several flaws and limitations..."
Then you are not American and have not lived here for long. I have lived in almost a dozen states spread all over the USA and everybody would know that is American English. Dander is a bit older, and rural, but you will find it in loads of writing that is taught in our schools.
The states: Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennesse, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, California, Colorado
My guess is that you are not American and have not spent much time here, or are very poorly educated.
..
ok actually andrew carnegie used this phrase, and so did some other industrialists in the early 1900s, when they did things like Henry Ford raising the wages of all of his workers something like five fold.
, Few asked his neuropsychologist wife whether he might be overreacting. She, too, agrees
Few then asked his mom about GE's data visualization who replied "Yes it's just horrible. Not as good as my pretty little boy could do."
>"never did suffer data visualization fools gladly"
suffer: verb - to put up with, to endure, to tolerate
data visualization fools - collective noun - idiots that don't know how to draw a graph.
gladly: adverb - enjoy with a smile. this word modifies the verb "suffer"
To rewrite the sentence fragment:
"never did gladly tolerate idiots that can't draw a good graph"
I like the original better.
> and "got Few's dander up"
If you've ever angered an animal enough to provoke a fight or flight response, its fur stands on end and its dander (skin flakes and dried saliva from grooming) is disturbed in a cloud as it moves. This can be seen if backlit. It's pissed.
It's good imagery.
--
BMO
As a New Englander (a Rhode Islander, even) yes, we do use these idioms.
They are more picturesque than boring "standard" English.
--
BMO
which is why nobody believes it.
there were a couple of protests about 10 years ago about an oil company dealing with some dictators in the western pacific, cant even remember the names.
one of the local 'professional student protestor' groups had this girl who went on a hunger strike over it.
Informative post, except for this:
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
Megacorporations are presenting a message alright, but it's not one of information. Rather it's delivering messages that make them either look good or confuse the issue, or both. Ever read How to Lie with Statistics? Megacorporations are not filled with dumb marketing people, they are almost certainly acquainted with such techniques. Are they lying to themselves as well as us? I don't know and I don't care. Fry's visualizations, and now McCandless's artsy ones, were chosen for good reason. They work. Even a person who is interested in factual information is diverted to blame the graphic designer instead of exploring the issue. My opinion is that people like Fry and McCandless, and especially the corporations who hire them, are trolling experts.
If interested in informative graphic design, check out Hans Rosling for an engaging presentation on population, or the Knuth of graphic designers Edward Tufte on analytical design and human factors. If you want to know more about fossil fuel problems, check out sources other than fossil fuel profiteers. For example Bartlett's more factual presentation on limited supplies and exponential growth.
"Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect." -- Edward Tufte
[I don't] suffer fools gladly is a crude way of pointing out that you're an arrogant douchebag.
Probably why St. Paul used it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffer_fools_gladly
dander is redneck slang for anger.
There's a good explanation of its origins here: http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/5/messages/289.html
When I hear the phrase "When I hear the phrase $x, I reach for my $y", I reach for my Quine.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Seriously, corporate data is always compromised and is the worst sort of misleading propaganda. It doesn't matter if it's a drug company, a software company,. a hardware company, an oil company, an airline, whatever. The corporate citizen has no character, integrity, principles, or purpose other than advancing the goals of the corporation...and whatever data it puts out reflects that. The only corporate data that is ever even remotely honest is the financial data and that's only because it is audited by somewhat-independent outside accounting professionals, although Enron showed us that even that data can be doctored.
Having seen things from the inside of GE I would say that it is half malicious and half incompetence. These guys make the same level of mistakes trying to deliver actual products and wonder why they end up failing miserably. Had the US government not bailed them out they would have failed...and that might have been a good thing considering how inefficient they are.
It's good imagery.
It might have been at some point. Now it's just hard to understand for some, a tired trope to others and a symptom of thesaurus overuse.
"Stephen Few never did suffer data visualization fools gladly."
That says it all for me. That Stephen Few is a genius I tell you!
The real story is summed up by the text of the first graphic: "The world has huge natural gas reserves" "63 years left". A frighteningly short time.
is called 'our times' (part of a series) from the early 1900s by some guy whose name i cant remember.