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Questions: 1. Rick Santorum, a candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination, claimed that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.” [Source: http://bit.ly/A77XED] What is being explicitly compared here? Is it a longitudinal or cross-sectional comparison? If 62 percent is the “part”, what is the “whole”? 2. Of [...]
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Read the following comparison: Consumers now owe more on their student loans than their credit cards. Americans owe some $826.5 billion in revolving credit, according to June 2010 figures from the Federal Reserve. (Most of revolving credit is credit-card debt.) Student loans outstanding today — both federal and private — total some $829.785 billion, according to Mark [...]
Via Truth & Justice’s Facebook Page. Find a figure (or a couple of figures) on homelessness in America. Find a figure on the number of houses in America. What percentage of houses would have to be unoccupied for this to be true? Does it sound plausible? Do a mental experiment — if we reduced homelessness [...]
From Nathan Yau’s Visualize This. This is a great graphic, and as Yau points out in his book it does everything right. It answers a simple question. It annotates what needs to be annotated, and rather than clutter the graph up with reference lines it tries to indicate broad trends in a graceful, uncluttered way. [...]