#percents

[thewitchqueen281]

I’ve figured out that exactly 79.999% of magical girls are lesbians

[yourgraphisbad]

Okay, this comes to me by suggestion from a friend. Not sure on the exact source. As usual, comments below the cut

Y-axis at zero, please: I almost didn’t notice this but it’s the biggest problem with this graph and many others. See how the iOS bars are generally taking up a little more space than the Android bars? Makes you think iOS has a slightly bigger market share, huh? No, not at all. The Y-axis here starts ridiculously at 75%, actually Android has close to 85% market share. This is confusing and extremely misleading, whether it was done intentionally or not I have no idea

Change over time: When your x-axis is time, you probably want to be showing change over time, huh? But there’s very little change here. That’s not a problem per se, but as a person who works with data and makes visualizations, I generally produce simple versions of a bunch of graphs, then pick the best ones and make them clear and pretty. This would not make it into my final presentation.

Percents vs values: I feel like this is going to be a recurring topic. Percents are not the solution to every data problem. Percents are not always the best way to show what’s going on. Here, I’d be very interested in the total size of the worldwide smartphone OS market. Even if the percents for Android and iOS are about the same, are they still both adding customers? It’s a really important business question as well. If the market is increasing then to increase your share you need to capture new users. If the market is steady or shrinking, then you need to focus on converting users of the other platform. That’s an actionable insight that this graph could be providing but isn’t.

Colors: This might seem like a minor point but it’s still very important. The blue and teal colors (and the green for Others) are too close together visually. I’ve seen plenty of graphs that look fine on one computer, but when you project or print you realize the colors are hard to distinguish and then the whole graph is useless. Use distinct colors. Also, and I’m not an expert here particularly, but I don’t think this is colorblind-friendly. Colorblindness is probably more common than you think, and it’s almost zero work to choose colorblind palettes for your visualizations so that they’re more accessible.

[adaminou]

Solving Problems with Proportions – 6th Grade Math Course

● Ratios compare two amounts to show how much of one thing there is compared to another ● Proportions are when two ratios are equal, like in a cake recipe where the amount of flour and sugar must stay the same ● Percents are special ratios that compare a number to 100, and they're used in sales, taxes, and grades.

Check it now from here.

[bathtimeboy]

Joshh has gotten hard about Tyler before 😳

I'm not sure it all depends how likely attraction to Tyler is. I think at least he has been attracted unconsciously, and maybe roughousing with tyler once got him excited. 70% likely

[pwnthesat]

The 1995 population of a small town was 8500 which represents a 20 percent decline from the 1990 population. What was the population of the town in 1990?

So the question is: [some population] - [20% of that population] = 8,500. In math, that’s:

x – 0.2x = 8,5000.8x = 8,500x = 10,625

[cryptobitnews]

Bitcoin (BTC) Up 8.2 Percents as More Americans Hold

Bitcoin (BTC) Up 8.2 Percents as More Americans Hold

Bitcoin (BTC) up 8.2 percent in last week

More Americans are owners of Bitcoin

A Blockchain Capital survey reveals that Bitcoin awareness, familiarity, and perception has improved, explaining the high Bitcoin (BTC) ownership in the US. At the time of press, Bitcoin (BTC) prices are stable, above $5,500 as buyers aim at $6,000.

Bitcoin Price Analysis Fundamentals

Blockchain brought…

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[yourgraphisbad]

Welcome to “Your Graph is Bad and You Should Feel Bad”, a blog started from my frustration at bad data visualizations. The most frustration is from people making arguments that I support, but making them in ways that are easy to dispute or disprove. There are also people who make bad graphs in support of arguments I disagree with though.

Anyway our first entry here is in the former category. I wasn’t a fan (and still am not a fan) of the GOP tax bill from last year, but I don’t like this visualization anyway.

 Confusing Measurement: I’m not sure what we’re measuring here in a lot of ways. What do you mean by “wages” and “profits”? Are those average wages of all workers, of non-management workers, of employees, does it include contractors, does it include tips, is that adjusted for cost of living, are those reported monthly or quarterly (hard to tell when there aren’t points marked on the graph), etc etc. I could ask pretty similar questions about profits (is that all corporations or just some top number, etc)

Confusing Measurement, part 2: This gets a separate bullet because what is going on. What does “Percent change from one year ago” mean? Are all of those measured relative to one year before the graph was made? Or are they all from one year before that point in time? Also  percents are notoriously hard to interpret correctly. Is 1% growth much worse than 2% growth? It’s half as much, but it’s only 1% less; change the way you phrase it and people interpret it differently.

Colors: I’m not sure whether this is necessarily bad, but the red/blue coloring here is likely intended to mirror the Republican/Democratic color assignment in politics to suggest that Republicans care more about corporate profits (in red) while Democrats care more about wages (in blue). 

Awfully convenient: Hey, see how that red line starts going up right at the same time as the GOP tax bill was passed? Wow, what an amazing correlation and/or causation. There’s some actual understanding needed of what’s in that tax bill and how the data here was gathered before we can say that there was a causation. Did the tax regulations change immediately when the bill was passed, or would they have taken longer to kick in? Was there anything else going on with the economy that was likely to contribute to rising corporate profits? A defender of the tax bill could also suggest at this point to track wages in a different way, as take-home pay may have increased even with nominal wages the same, then maybe both lines would jump after the tax bill.

I do want to stress again that I don’t like that tax bill, and I do believe that it helped corporations and the already rich more than the working classes. I just don’t think this image is likely to change anyone’s mind, at least not without a considerable amount more research.

On a related note that I couldn’t fit into any of those bullets, economic data is often estimates, and even official government reports are updated after the fact. See this FiveThirtyEight post for a lot of information about how and why that happens. The point is, if someone is making an argument based on numbers that just came out, you should know those numbers have a lot of uncertainty to them, and so should any argument based on them