BP tries to mislead you with graphs
BP senior vice president Kent Wells explains in this new video what his group is doing towards repairing the leak. He presents the bar graph above to show the improvement in their efforts. It's increasing, so they must be improving. Nifty. The problem is that it's cumulative, and the rate at which they're collecting isn't improving.
From the Maddow blog:
[T]hose green bars go up because the tube has been in place since May 16. The longer it stays, the more gallons it collects. It's not necessarily collecting more oil on successive days, let alone "most" of the oil as Wells says they're trying to do.
Stephen Few provides a different view, with collection rates:
Few goes on to say:
While the amount of collection increased in the beginning, it has decreased or held steady for the last four days and is now well below the average amount of daily collection for this period as a whole. Things are definitely not getting better. How do you spin bad news like this? One way is to create a misleading graph, but cover your ass by doing it in a way that isn’t an outright lie.
To put it differently, you could easily spin BP's results in the opposite direction. A cumulative graph for the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf would be an increasing one too.
however that chart is also misleading, as the rate of oil being released is not constant.
What you really want is a chart that shows the barrels of oil released on a given day, the # of barrels collected on a given day, and the # of barrels that remain at large on that day. Unfortunately the first and last data points needed are just guesses. Only then would you be able to gauge the progress in slowing the leak, and the progress in collecting what has leaked. when all 3 data points are back at zero, the job would be done.
Mislead? I’m not defending BP here but I certainly hope most people know what ‘cumulative” means.
presenting data is showing it your way. Let’s put ourselves in the VP shoes. BP are trying to tell the world that they are making huge efforts to fix their mess, which I believe it’s true – even though they are not successful, to put it lightly.
With that in mind, what should he stress in his presentation? on what BP has “accomplished” – not on the magnitude of the disaster, nor on the multiple problems they have had in the process.
The chart is not misleading. A bar chart can be categorical, it doesn’t have to be a series in absolute numbers. Had it been a line curve, I would have another opinion.
Meanwhile, there has been multiple charts that show exactly the contrary, which is also fair.
After approximately 6 weeks, BP finally tried its so-called ‘junk shot’ to plug the oil leak that it caused. It is not clear if that attempt worked.
Before it tried this, BP was trying to preserve its drilling investment by capturing the spewing oil for processing; it did not want to stop the leak, which permitted thousands of gallons of oil to spew into the Gulf. It made an obvious decision to maximize its investment at the cost of allowing the flowing oil to damage whatever it was going to damage.
If what the flowing oil was going to damage was only BP’s property, that decision made sense. But BP decided to put at substantial risk of destruction the livelihoods of many, many people on the Gulf coast who rely upon the Gulf and its beaches. That was a decision that BP has not put on a chart, but should be charted by someone.
C’mon; they would be fools NOT to engage in PR.
Two Latin phrases come to mind – Caveat emptor – let the buyer beware for the seller will try everything to give it a positive spin – Caveat Venditor – seller beware – for you will be found out !
I took Stephen’s Numbers plus the current estimate of 15K Barrels leaking per day, along with the sugggestion of Jehiah to calculate “Barrels at large” and came up with this view:
http://ivorysofa.blogspot.com/.....rt-of.html
Tells slightly different story than BP would like to tell.
The point I made in my own blog (having seen the graph here) is that a PR trick that works for the majority of the audience can nevertheless backfire when the numerate minority not only recognises that the ‘good news’ is actually ‘bad news’ but also recognises deliberate deception.
“I expect a PR person at BP was delighted with this cunning ruse. It’s not a lie. All you have to do is use an apparently straightforward graph that is actually quite subtle and you can make the majority of your audience believe a bad story is a good one. For the numerate portion of the audience though it just makes BP look like a bunch of shysters – it’s a PR disaster.”
http://adamnieman.posterous.co.....-animation
(I’ve been working on my own Deepwater Horizon graphics. They are a little more ingenuous than BPs.)
Why did this post disappear? I smell a BP rat.