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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.'"
What's good for GE shows up as legislation in America.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
I don't know much about visualization either, but this one is really obvious. Empty spaces add perceived volume to the graph, so that it looks bigger (compared to the full square that show how much we use each year). Our brains don't know how to calculate the percentage of empty space into the perceived size.
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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.
Adjust the sliders to match the production increases over the last ten years, and you get 38 years left for oil, 42 years left for natural gas, and 44 years left for coal. Which makes the premise that "The World has Huge Natural Gas Reserves" totally false, unless you have no children and only expect to live for 40 years or less.
How many years of Sunlight Reserves do we have left?
Over 4,000,000,000 years.
Do you need a visualization to understand the difference between 40 years and 4,000,000,000 years?
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.
Maybe the summary could actually try to summarize what is going on. For example it could let us know:
* Who is Stephen Few? Is he an expert in this filed or some random blogger?
* What data on the GE website are they talking about? If there are many different sets of data give an example of one.
* What is 'Eyeo Festival'?
Providing some basic context lets us know whether TFA is worth reading - as is stands it just bunch of meaningless drivel.
Limited Liability doesn't mean what you think it does. It provides a wall of separation between owners/shareholders and employees, but it does nothing to limit the liability of individuals doing bad acts. If someone does something bad, doing so under the guise of an LLC doesn't shield them from legal liability. Merely from financial liability if the actors are acting within the confines of their fiduciary responsibility.