Charts and graphs are great, because they can let you see a pattern that you might not see in a spreadsheet, but they only work when you use the actual data. Fox News isn't doing themselves any favors by putting up this chart. It shows the recently announced drop in unemployment rate to 8.6 percent as a non-change.

The November rate is lower than the March rate of 8.8 percent, but it's shown to be higher in the Fox News chart. Here's what the graph should look like, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

It doesn't quite beat the best pie chart ever, but it's close.

Honest mistake? Wishful thinking? Little of both?

[Media Matters via @periscopic]

The argument behind this graph in The Wall Street Journal is that the middle class has most of the money and ties into a larger argument about who should be taxed what. There is after all a spike in the middle. Is that really the case though? Sound off in the comments.

(Cheat sheet: Jonathan Chait explains what's going on and Kevin Drum improves the graph to show more truth, although his graph can be improved, too. Grab the data here [Excel spreadsheet] from the IRS, and give it a go.)

[Wall Street Journal via @joandimicco]

President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address yesterday, and this year it was "enhanced" by charts and graphs. Basically, as Obama spoke, graphics that you could equate to Powerpoint slides showed up on the side. What'd you think of the enhancement? Did it add or detract from the message? Were the graphics used honestly and effectively?

One thing's for sure: there's something wrong with that bubble chart. Uh oh.

Below is the full SOTU for reference.

[State of the Union via dy/dan | Thanks, Kyle]

I was going to post this graphic from Good when it came out, but decided not to. I made the same mistake when I first started out. It was another case of wrongly sized bubbles. But they fixed the problem, so now we can see what a big difference it makes.

The above is the original. Notice how much bigger the right bubble is compared to the rest; however, it should only be a little over four times bigger than the second from the right, and about 30 times bigger than that itsy bitsy, tiny bubble on the left. It's clearly wrong. I scaled some circles to see what was going on, but I'm not sure. It wasn't even sizing by radius.

Here's the revised version. Bubbles are correctly sized by area (proportionate to the square root of the radius). Much better.

The lesson: graphs and charts might be automatically generated by your software, but you still have to make sure the output is right.

Now we can discuss the content rather than the mechanics. The graphic shows government subsidies for different energy sources. It argues that there is a skew in funding for fossil fuels, hence the larger green bubble. But how much of that difference is simply because there are more fossil fuel sources than the others?

On Friday, Michael D. Smith, dean of the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, issued a letter to the faculty confirming the inquiry and saying the eight instances of scientific misconduct involved problems of “data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results.” No further details were given.

This is why we don't just accept any old data and why we care about the methodology behind the numbers. Stuff like this always reminds me of an exam question that asked us to investigate the data from an article in a prominent scientific journal. The analysis was all wrong.

Sometimes data is wrong out of ignorance. Other times it's wrong because people make stuff up. I can understand the former, but why you would ever do the latter is beyond me.

[via]

Update: More details on what happened from research assistants' point of view on the Chronicle. [thx, Winawer]

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.

No clue where this is from, but something seems sort of off, no? I guess we should take the title literally. By the numbers... only.

I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt though, and assume this was just an honest mistake. Here's my guess about what happened. A deadline was coming up quick, and a graphics editor put this together to get a feel for what the final design would look like. He then saved it as a different file, and then went to work. Except when it came time to send the file to the printers, the editor sent the wrong file. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

[via @EagerEyes]

What? I don't see anything wrong with it.

Alright, alright, so it's local news, but still, come on. I wonder if the newscaster even bats an eye as he's reading the numbers off the teleprompter:

[via @kevinthepang & @eagereyes & Wonkette | Thanks, all]

This graphic on the history and future of information has been making the rounds. Several people sent it to me a while back, but it didn't seem quite right, so I didn't post it; however, this post from PZ Meyers compelled me to take another look. Meyers says:

Some days, I think other people must be aliens. Or I must be. For instance, there's a lot of noise right now about this article analyzing the future of information and media that, if you read the comments, you will discover that people are praising to an astonishing degree. I looked at it and saw this graph [above graphic]. And my bullshit detector went insane. It's supposed to be saying something about where people are and will be getting their information, but there's no information about where this information came from, and it's meaningless!

Yikes. Take out the boxing gloves. Looks like we've got another clash between the technical and the design-ish and mainstream crowds. The comments from both sides are also pretty interesting with one group saying how visually appealing and informative the graphic is with the other group criticizing the graphic for failing in every way.

Good or Bad?

Clearly the graphic is not based on any real data or metric. It goes off history and probably a lot of Wikipedia entries, and then shapes and sizes go off feeling. So as an analytical graph, it doesn't work. But what about as an opinion in graph form? Does it work then? What do you think? Is this graphic a crime against all that is good in visualization or does it work for what it was trying to do?

[Thanks, Patrick]

If there's anything good that has come out of America's financial crisis, it's the interesting and high-quality infographics. This isn't one of them. Below is an ill-conceived bubble chart from BillShrink that "shows" average U.S. consumer spending. Notice anything wrong with it?

Bar versus bubble debate aside, there is a ton of room for improvement as well as huge need for some fact-checking and common sense. For a blog on a site for personal finance, the graphic is, well, not something to be proud of. FlowingData readers know that I like to stay away from heavy-handed critique on what works and what doesn't (I leave that to you guys), but this BillShrink graphic is just so clearly confusing that it's worth pointing out what doesn't work so we can learn from others' mistakes. Can you find the flaws?

[Thanks, Jess]