Money and Death on Vox, a bad infographic
I saw this on Twitter, apparently it's an infographic (or, in the parlance of those who want information graphical design to be, well, informative, a "chartoon") from a Vox article:
To begin with, these bubble diagrams, when correctly dimensioned (when they represent the data in an accurate graphical form), make comparisons difficult. Can you tell from that chart which cancer, breast or prostate, is more over-funded?
To add to that, this infographic isn't correctly dimensioned; it uses geometry to tell a lie (probably unwittingly), and that lie can be quantified with a lie factor:
The lie factor is the ratio of the perceived relative size of the geometric objects (for circles: areas) to the relative magnitude of the numbers (the money and deaths): you could fit eighteen of the COPD deaths circles inside the heart disease deaths circle, though the number of heart disease deaths are just a bit over four times those of COPD.
I would have thought that decades after Edward Tufte made this point in The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information, we'd no longer see this problem, but I was mistaken.
The infographic is used to make the point that donations are not correlated with deadliness, by showing what's effectively only a comparison of two rank orders. A better way to compare these two numbers would be to compute how much money is donated for each death or how many people die for each donated dollar, or both:
Note how easy the comparisons become and how two clear clusters appear in this format. That's the purpose of information graphical design, to make the insights in the data visible, not to decorate articles as a dash of color.
An anniversary of sorts: my Rotten Tomatoes analysis model is one year old.
On Dec 31, 2018, I watched a Nerdrotics video where Gary made the qualitative case for critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes using opposite criteria to evaluate certain TV shows. Out of curiosity, I decided to check that with data. That led to a few entertaining hours doing all sorts of complicated things until I settled on a very simple model, which I quickly coded into a spreadsheet, for extra convenience, and a number of fun tweets ensued, like the latest one:
The model:
Step 1: Treat all ratings as discretized into $\{0,1\}$. Denote the number of critics and audience members respectively by $N_C$ and $N_A$ and their number of likes (1s) by $L_C$ and $L_A$.
Step 2: Operationalize the hypotheses as probabilities. Under 'same criteria,' the probability of critics and audience liking is denoted $\theta_0$; under 'opposite criteria,' probability of critics liking is denoted $\theta_1$, and since the audience has opposite criteria, their probability of liking is $1-\theta_1$.
Step 3: Using the data and the operationalization, get estimates for $\theta_0$ and $\theta_1$. Notation-wise we should call them $\hat \theta_0$ and $\hat \theta_1$ but we're going to keep calling them $\theta_0$ and $\theta_1$.
Step 4: Compute the likelihood ratio of the hypotheses (how much more probable 'opposite' is than 'same'), by computing
$LR = \frac{\theta_1^{L_C} \, (1-\theta_1)^{N_C - L_C}} {\theta_0^{L_C} \, (1-\theta_0)^{N_C - L_C}} \, \frac{(1- \theta_1)^{L_A} \, \theta_1^{N_A - L_A}}{\theta_0^{L_A} \, (1-\theta_0)^{N_A - L_A}} $
(For numerical reasons this is done in log-space.) The reason I use likelihood ratios is to get rid of the large combinatorics (note their absence from that formula), which in many cases are beyond the numerical reach of software without installing special packages:
Going to the Moon... Done, moving on.
☹️ Let's just let the numbers speak for themselves:
Sainsbury's bans veggie bags
To be fair to Sainsbury's, they probably see this as a monetization opportunity under the cover of social responsibility (objections will be socially costly for those objecting), so probably not a bad business decision, irritating though it might be.
(I use a backpack as a shopping bag, and have been doing so for a long time, before there was any talk of bans or charging for bags. Because it's more practical to carry stuff on your back than in your hands. But I agree with Sam Bowman, this is starting to be too much anti-consumer.)
Gas for a 5 mile drive in a 25 MPG car yields about 1.8 kg of CO2. A 4 g polyethylene bag has a 24 g CO2 footprint. So, someone who walks to a local store [me] could use 74 plastic bags and still have lower footprint than someone who drives to a strip mall supermarket.
Engineer watches Rogue One, critique ensues
Typically, switches with overarching functions (say, "master switches") will have some sort of mechanical barrier to accidental movement, for example you have to lift them or press a button to unlock them before moving; sometimes they have locking affordances so that only authorized people (with the key or the code) can move them. There were none of these basic precautions here.
Apparently this switch controlling the entire facility's communications was located on the side of the taxiway for one of the landing pads, for... reasons? (Well, there's a reason: to get the drama of the pilot linking the cable and then the sacrifice of the two other fighters.)
And as for the final fight on top of the tower…
Consider that even if there was some reason the antenna was in some way dependent on actuators located on these pontoons, the controls for those actuators need not be near the actuators. It would make more sense for them to be near the central column anyway, just like the controls for a ship's engine are in the engine control room and act electrically on the actuators in the engine room (where there are backup electric controls and also mechanical access to the actuators themselves).
Big box gyms playing their usual pricing games of this season
(It's not hard to identify 24HourFitne…, ahem, the Big Box franchise from the name of the plans, but this is not a franchise-specific problem, it's a "all big box gyms and many smaller gyms that copy their policies" problem.)
And of course gyms want resolutioners to sign up for a year, as they know most of them will drop out soon:
Book buying, a personal history
So many books, so little time. But at least the wait is much shorter now.
Linkage
Unlike all the CYA statements people add to their various social media accounts to emphasize that which should be obvious — that retweeting and commenting is not an endorsement, much less a blanket endorsement of the entire sub-topology of what is being retweeted or commented on — these links are my endorsement of the content linked:
Plants can improve your work life — Phys.org
This may be a transcendent year for SpaceX — Ars Technica.
The World's Largest Science Experiment — Physics Girl on YouTube (video)
Metal Mayhem - with Andrew Szydlo — Royal Institution on YouTube (video)
The Hacksmith is taking a social media break. (Instagram.)
And showing that sports are much better when you replace them with engineering, here's Destin 'Smarter Every Day' Sandlin:
Live long and prosper.
