Thomas Lumley is an early contender for identifying the worst chart of 2013. This special breed of awful is accomplished by creating a chart that actually takes more effort to process than text describing the differences would. Since the point of charts is to convey information efficiently, there really is no good reason for this chart to exist.
Of course, as a long time SAS programmer I am biased against graphical displays of data in general (you would be too if you had to use gplot and gchart). But I think that this example will be disliked by the R and STATA crowd too.
I think my favourite part of that chart is that ages are listed as decimals (17.2, 18.2, etc.) ... yet every measurement is an integer! I have no idea what they were thinking ... too much Excel rots the brain, presumably.
ReplyDelete