Bar Graph Etiquette

A pet peeve of mine is a representation of data in table format... especially on a Powerpoint slide. Numbers bear no meaning, and frankly, a majority of readers are visual, and would like to see simplified, dumbed-down, colour-coding galore visual aids.

Like a father would say to his estranged child: "You mean nothing to me." 

But after attending an industry conference this week, I quickly realized instead of making data easier to swallow, certain people shove the data down people's throat, enforce a spew due to the shoving, take that spew and further shove it down people's throat, inducing the runs in said people's digestive systems, and take the results from this process and slap it on some chart like finger paint. 

If you believe the above description was quite graphic, I would like to refer you to the examples below. Please beware that the following charts may be a little grizzly for those readers with a weak stomach.

Someone at some point between 1978-1999 managed to survey all women. A statistical God. And what woman could possibly live without life's #1 necessities, kids backslash money? I'm quite certain there should be an "I'm with stupid(s)" next to those arrows. I have no clue as to what other purpose they would be serving otherwise. 

Like a really bad American movie that tries to get more attention at the box office, it has gone 3-D! And I stand corrected: someone managed to survey all American women between 1978-1999. An American statistical God. 

NC and FA are increasing!!! Someone, make them stop. 

This is a prime example of a researcher that is too lazy to touch their millions of data points recorded by the second. So the logical thing to do is to of course plot everything on one graph, and make each data set a vibrant neon colour. Joy! 

Bar graphs and annotations: like whiskey in a pina colada. 

Mr. Blow is not a fan of pies. He much prefers cinnamon buns instead. 

In order to avoid the visual aids atrocities, like the ones above, I would like to suggest the following:

• Simplicity is sexy. Keep it simple. Don't stack bar on top of bar in your bar graphs. It only makes them harder to grasp, because your readers have to take the sections of that bar graph, extrapolate back to the axis, read the scale, do the math in their head... Just too much effort. 
• 3-D graphs are stupid. They are useless and they don't do any good. Just don't use them. 
• If there is too little data to plot, just don't plot it.
• If there is way too much data to plot, average it over time periods, indecize it, blur out the noise, do something to show you've actually analyzed the data, and not blindly copied everything into an Excel spreadsheet. 
• Get creative with your charts, but don't make them more confusing. Making your readers feel stupid reading your chart, does not make your chart a good chart.

I would like to finish this post with a great example of good visual aids, which you may find in the video clip (which is a great visual aid within itself) below:

Oh Marshall... 

Heehee, cooties!

Today at grad school, I learned that sentences like this still make me giggle, especially when said out loud by my super-renowned-dude-in-industry lecturer:

"There are 20,000 species of woody plants."

I also learned that polyvinyl acetate emulsion (AKA Elmer's primary school glue) is edible. Tomorrow, I hope to learn that safety scissors have a hidden secondary function... like teleportation.

Dude, I knew them before they went mainstream.

Where I'm from, it's infested with hipsters. "What are hipsters?" many may ask. Well, I think this guy's animal illustrations articulate hipsters beautifully.

Thanks to a slide from my materials engineering lecture, I can help the regression relation enthusiasts amongst you better understand this utterly pointless phenomena of our generation. Refer to Roger's Adoption / Innovation Curve Hipster Identification Curve in the figure below: 

As you can see, being a hipster is mastering walking the fine line between being a weirdo and a wanna-be. A hipster can also be identified through observation, namely the logic behind their attire (refer to the photograph below): 

(photograph stolen from some Mexican guy named Carlos "Douche" Sanchez... who likes rocking jean shorts)

In conclusion, hipsterism is too complex to understand at this point, even with the advancements in technology. Further research is required to comprehend this phenomena. However, if Heisenberg's uncertainty principle teaches us anything, it is to avoid undertaking this gruesome task. 

You're in grad school?!

Less than two years ago, while doing my undergrad, had you asked me if I wanted to go back to school after graduating, I would have said "HEILL NO!" (as in "hell" with two syllables). Where am I now today? One weeks into working towards eventually doing research in some numerical modelling thing doing some investigative in-situ testing, and experimental work, and data analysis, to complete a thesis on... whatever. 


Within this one weeks, I have learned grad school is actually quite amusing. Here are the distinct differences between undergraduate studies and grad studies that I have picked up on so far:

• Faculty actually like you.
• Faculty actually like you, so they give you stuff (free office, free locker, free printing privileges, building keypad access codes, keys to places... whoot!) 
• You don't go to school to socialize.
• You enjoy learning about the fundamentals of thermodynamics... the second time around. 
• In undergrad school, you're poor and your friends are poor. In grad school, your friends make mad cash, but you're still poor. 
• You don't ask the person next to you any questions.
• You don't ask anyone stupid questions. 
• Your classmates have full-time jobs, spouses, kids, a mortgage, and a lease on a car.
• No inter-departmental / inter-faculty rivalry. 
• You have to actually collaborate with other departments and disciplines. 
• By now you know printing slides for lectures is a waste of time, and toner (and paper I guess).
• You only have three lectures per week... 3 hours long each. 

I shall leave you here to ponder upon my first post, so I can go start on my fundamentals of thermodynamics. But before I do that, I'll leave you with a little flashback of my first-year physics tutorial from my undergrad years:

- Me: Ummm, I got negative entropy for the answer to this question.

- TA: Congratulations. You've just destroyed the universe. I hope you're happy.