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 College found that in 2009-10, nearly 20,000 adults were coded as having attended paediatric outpatient services, and 3,000 patients under 19 were apparently treated in geriatric clinics. Even more striking, between 15,000 and 20,000 men have been admitted to obstetric wards each year since 2003, and almost 10,000 to gynaecology wards.

It’s hard to put your faith in analysis, visualization, policy, and anything else that comes out of data with reports like these. With human error being a known issue, we have to find better ways of inputting and double-checking data. Unfortunate mistakes at the outset only lead to bigger problems down the line.

The unassuming little Descriptive Camera made me rethink data. This project by Matt Richardson was on display at the ITP Spring Show. The basic premise is that you take a photo and the camera spits out a textual description of what it sees. The results are remarkably accurate, detailed, and humorous.
Read More

What is Missing? by Maya Lin seeks to raise awareness about the mass extinction of species. It has a beautiful interface. The world map is black on a sea of black. Your mouse acts as a sort of flashlight layered between land and water, showing you glimpses of familiar coastlines and allowing you to select dots that tell the stories of extinction.
Read More

Yesterday I visited the ever popular NYU ITP bi-annual show which is a showcase of the students’ experimental and ingenious interactive work.

I stopped to talk to data visualization student and self-tracker, Doug Kanter, about his work. His first and smaller piece was about the war in Iraq. The image above depicts the number of wounded US soldiers by state (and territory) using the red stripes. The stars show the number of soldiers killed. I’m sure we could quibble about labels and where the bar chart starts, but to me, the tattered appearance of the flag created by data about war is very arresting.
Read More

I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks, with little to no Internet access most of the time, so I’ve asked Kim Rees to step in while I’m gone. She’s the co-founder of Periscopic, one of my favorite information visualization firms, and she was the technical editor for Visualize This. You’re in good hands.

You can follow her at @krees.

Be good, and see you all when I get back.

She’s all yours, Kim.

Nicolas Rapp dives into the patterns and growth of worldwide shipping in a six-page spread for Fortune Magazine.

Nearly 90% of all goods traded across borders travel, in part, by sea. Typically a ship will undertake six voyages a year. The fastest-growing routes are between ports in Asia, while goods moving out of that continent account for 43% of all maritime trade, according to IHS Global, an economic forecasting firm. Today the most heavily trafficked sea route is between China and the West Coast of the U.S. The total value of goods that travel from China to the U.S. is four times that of those on the return trip—a clear symbol of America’s trade deficit.

Despite a gap of a few centuries, the routes today still look a lot like the ones from the 18th century.

I’m pretty sure I’m not in their target audience, but my main takeaway from this video is that now, with easel.ly, you don’t need time, money, or skill to make quality infographics. And the prezi-like video seems fitting.

Maybe I’m just stuck in my ways, but I’m having trouble getting on board with these tools. Easel.ly, for example, provides themes, such as the one on the right. There’s a guy in the middle with graphs around him and pointers coming out of his body. You get to edit however you want.

So in this case, you start with a complete visual and then work your way backwards to the data, which I’m not sure how you can edit other than manually changing the size of the graphs. (Working with the interface takes some patience at this stage in the application’s life.) It’s rare that good graphics are produced when you go this direction.

Instead, start with the data (or information) first and then build around that — don’t try to fit the data (or information) into a space it wasn’t meant for.

Or maybe there’s a lot more in store that we can’t see yet. Either way, right now, the application is rough at best.

Robert Groves, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, on the Appropriations Bill:

The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

A lot of the negative comments following the post are from people who have never used Census data, or any substantial amount of data for that matter, and have no clue how a dataset can feed into a model to make other estimates. Then there’s the people who don’t want to answer questions about their toilets. I wonder what their Facebook profiles look like.

Princeton history graduate student Benjamin Schmidt explores changes in language through TV anachronisms. In Schmidt’s most recent analysis, he examines Megan’s use of “callback” in the last episode of Mad Men. Above is the ratio of modern use to period use. Notice callback sticking out in the top left.

The big one from the charts: Megan gets “a callback for” an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word “callback” is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and “callback for” is even worse. The OED doesn’t have any examples of a theater-oriented use of “callback” until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn’t really suite Megan’s generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff’s lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. “call-back” and “call back” don’t seem much more likely.

Other anachronisms include the use of “pay phone” and a frequent use of “on the phone with” which didn’t peak until the 1970s.

Don’t miss the look into Downton Abbey anachronisms. Also, more details from Schmidt on his methodology.

[via Revolutions]