Mistaken Data

The administration tweeted a chart that shows the Senate Republican health care bill increases Medicaid funding. The line moves up, so it must be true, right? Well, it depends on…

Statistics is a game of subtleties, and you lose when you don’t pay attention to the details. Here are a handful of common mistakes when interpreting the numbers. In a…

Government data isn’t always the easiest to use with computers. Maybe it’s in PDF format. Maybe you have to go through a roundabout interface. Maybe you have to manually request…

This is what happens when there is a disconnect between data and what it represents. So much wrong.…

Last week, Facebook announced that it was making the Trending Topics section more automated. More algorithm-based. Less person-based. On Monday, the section showed a fake news story at the top…

As we delve deeper into election season, politicians will spit out more and more statistics to lend some factitude to their talking points. Some are real, and others will be…

Last week, graduate student Michael J. LaCour was in the news for allegedly making up data. The results were published in Science. LaCour’s co-author Donald Green requested a retraction, but…

Last month, This American Life ran a story about research that asked if you could change people’s mind about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion — with just a 22-minute…

A data-centric look at New England Patriots fumble rates at home made the rounds this week. The most cited tidbit was that there is only a 1 in 16,233 chance…

A short post on Bloomberg from 2013 describes the fall of U.S. mens’ income for the past forty years. To illustrate, the author uses the chart above, and we’re like,…

Most people probably wouldn’t think much about this poster that shows the values of Thomson Reuters. But when you think of the graphic as a Venn diagram, it’s hard to…

By way of David Kennerr, something in this CNN frame seems off.…

Shutterfly sent promotional emails that congratulate new parents and encourage them to send thank you cards. The problem: a lot of people on that list weren’t new parents. Several tipsters…

Because Fox News. See also this, this, and this. [Thanks, Meron]…

From the Winnipeg Sun. Something isn’t right here. [via]…

I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad. Obama has his work cut out for him. [Thanks, @adamsinger]…

Fox News tried to show the change in the top tax rate if the Bush tax cuts expire, so they showed the rate now and what’d it be in 2013.…

The Mitt Romney campaign put this venn diagram up a few days ago, aiming to show the “promise gap.” On the left is an Obama promise, and on the right…

Garbage in, garbage out the old adage goes. Nigel Hawkes, Director of Straight Statistics, describes a sort of statistical whistleblowing letter to the British Medical Journal. A team from Imperial…

From Gizmodo, this shows battery size in the new iPad versus that of the iPad 2. The battery in the former is 70 percent bigger than that of the latter.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Shady research from Harvard scientist Marc Hauser is confirmed: On Friday, Michael D. Smith, dean of the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, issued a letter to the faculty confirming…

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.

What? I don’t see anything wrong with it.…

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…

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…

I know next to nothing about the economy, stocks, and investments, but I do know a little bit about charts and graphs. The above area circles were prepared by someone…