From Marion Nestle’s book on Food Politics: Questions: What is wrong with this graph? In what ways is it deceptive? How would you fix it? What might be a better format?
![food-dollar[1]](http://www.makingfaircomparisons.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/food-dollar1-300x190.png)
Lessons & Questions on: P
Activity: Chance of Dying in One Year
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. [...]
![nalp_bimodal[1]](http://www.makingfaircomparisons.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/nalp_bimodal1-300x225.jpg)
Activity: Law Salaries
The graph above shows salaries of 2006 graduates of law school as measured in 2007. 1. The study did not include people out of work. How might the graph shape change if it included people out of work? Would the median salary be lower or higher? 2. Look up the term “bimodal distribution”. Does this [...]
![dextergot3[1]](http://www.makingfaircomparisons.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/dextergot31-300x185.png)
Zero-day Comparisons
Game of Thrones, Season 2 is getting illegally downloaded. A lot. In fact, it’s on track to be the most pirated show of 2012, and maybe 2011 as well: Maybe that’s interesting to you, maybe not. Here’s what’s interesting to me: notice the horizontal axis of the graph. What this represents is number of days [...]
![4963409391_b56582026a_o[1]](http://www.makingfaircomparisons.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/4963409391_b56582026a_o1-300x270.jpg)
Activity: CEO Pay Infographic
Via http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdsdigital/4963409391/sizes/o/in/photostream/ Click on the graphic to enlarge. IN this graphic, the association is made that the more people were laid off at a company, the bigger the salary. That seems like we are rewarding incompetence! What might be a confounding factor? What should be taken into account to fix the comparison? Hint: ptgaeocfiszeoynmtp If such [...]