Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[methylatedspirit]

Plus I can read that pie chart just fine. It looks like the purple section rotated a bit around the center, which means that mostly children went from "OK" to "Excited" and other sectors stayed roughly the same.

Sure, but what if it's during a presentation? You're probably already bored to death (or maybe that's just me) by the time you see that thing, so I'm not sure if you'd be willing to allocate the brainpower to actually overlaying the sectors over each other. The chart has no respect for the time- and brainpower-constrained audience. It's not making good use of limited resources; it's inefficient.

I mean, the second point is that it's asking the audience to derive a story from raw data. Again, this implies a lack of respect for the audience. They're really only willing to take 7 seconds to look at the slides and understand what's going on, so make it count. The second chart (the bar chart) tells the story that, in no uncertain terms, that the children were more excited overall after the pilot program. What story do the 2 pie charts tell? I dunno, you figure it out yourself, dummy. People understand stories better than just raw data. Make use of that. (At this point, you really should be reading that book to get what I mean; I found my copy quite easily online)

[scriver]

I am 100% with methy on this. The pie charts are clear, but they ain't clear. I'd did take me some time staring at them to conceptualise what was happening in them.

[Reelya]

I mean, the second point is that it's asking the audience to derive a story from raw data. Again, this implies a lack of respect for the audience. They're really only willing to take 7 seconds to look at the slides and understand what's going on, so make it count. The second chart (the bar chart) tells the story that, in no uncertain terms, that the children were more excited overall after the pilot program. What story do the 2 pie charts tell? I dunno, you figure it out yourself, dummy. People understand stories better than just raw data. Make use of that. (At this point, you really should be reading that book to get what I mean; I found my copy quite easily online)

I went over the pie charts myself and generally agree with you here. It took quite a bit of back and forth between the charts, looking at the numbers, the legend, and the size of the chunks to work out what the story was. For example the first thing I noticed was the largest green chunk on the left, checked the legend and it was "OK", then my eyes went over to the right pie chart and noticed that the green chunk had significantly shrunk, implying less people were "OK" now. So, that initial information was sending a mixed message: why was the largest "OK" chunk now smaller? Less people were "OK" afterwards? Then it took a bunch more flicking back and forth between the pie charts to work out that less were "OK" because they'd shifted into Interested and Excited categories. All of that is clearly wasted time that could be avoided with a more appropriate choice.

It's not really the sizes however, it's the extra work connecting the dots. The choice of chart type just wasn't appropriate. For example, the categories are ordered from best to worst, whereas a pie chart removes the ordering, thus it's lost information by default: best and worst are now right next to each other. So yeah, I'm not sure the main problem here is the size judgements, it's the unordering of the information and the extra legwork you need to do to connect related information since laying it out like that scatters relevant info to all corners of the infographic.

Really the only time you want to use a pie graph is when you're trying to point out how one thing, the biggest, is disproportionately large: making a visceral point, such as doing a pie chart showing federal spending and the chunk that's for the military or something. The point isn't to accurately convey the sizes of all chunks, the point is to highlight something being out of whack, and in that case a pie chart makes the point more cleanly than a bar graph, since some of the bars will be very small, so most of your screen would be wasted whitespace. For example if you wanted to highlight how massive the sun is compared to the planets you could do a bar graph, but the sun would be one huge line and there would be empty space on most of the screen, or you could do a pie chart representing each body's proportion of the mass of the solar system. The pie chart would be the punchier choice here.

Using dual pie graphs for a before and after like that is clearly an engineered example that's using the tools incorrectly. That's not what pie charts are good for. The information that matters in that example is how the values changed over time, and the pie charts don't convey that well.

[Maximum Spin]

Am I the only one who found the pie chart science thing perfectly legible? You have to sort of imagine it fanning out like an accordion binder (or an accordion, I guess); moving from one to the other, some pockets expand while others simultaneously contract. For me this process is essentially instantaneous.

The utility of the pie chart here is that we are looking at subparts of a single group that doesn't change across the transition, so the total area of the chart is the same and all the slices add up to 1. A bar chart doesn't convey movement from one subgroup to another in the same way because the bars are not intrinsically bounded. One of those stacked-bar charts, with a before-stack and after-stack, would be equally effective, though.

[Rolan7]

I don't see that just from the images, but perhaps an animated loop between the two would communicate that!

[A_Curious_Cat]

During the Age of Sail, did anyone ever train the ship’s cat to use the cathead?

[Frumple]

Looking up what a cathead is, I can't see how that would even be possible, so... probably not.

[A_Curious_Cat]

Looking up what a cathead is, I can't see how that would even be possible, so... probably not.

The cat walks out to the end, sticks it’s rear over the end and does it’s business.

[Uthimienure]

Looking up what a cathead is, I can't see how that would even be possible, so... probably not.

The cat walks out to the end, sticks it’s rear over the end and does it’s business.

In the voice of Miracle Max, "It would take a miracle."

[KittyTac]

You know how Asians being hard to tell apart is a common stereotype? Do Asian countries also have this stereotype but about white people?

[TD1]

I just realised I probably have social anxiety. I never really thought of it in that light before. I probably also have anxiety attacks. Again, not how I would have thought of it.

Thing is it's all very specific. I'm perfectly fine with everything unless a number of different criteria are met.

It's not like I'm not outgoing. I love talking to people. I'd say I'm probably an extrovert. Maybe that's why it's taken me so long to clue on.

Anyway, question: I looked up coping mechanisms. Apparently concentrating on the feel of your clothes helps. Also controlling breathing. But I feel both would look weird to an external observer when in a social situation. Anyone got experience with this malarkey?

[bloop_bleep]

When I get anxious I take long deep breaths already, so I can't speak to the efficacy of controlling breathing... Maybe I should try taking short, quick breaths?

Focusing on something else sometimes works, though.

[Frumple]

Most folks don't really notice how you breath, tbh. Long breaths or paying attention to your breathing is extremely unlikely to attract much attention if you're not making a show of it.

Internal awareness, i.e. paying attention to the weight of your clothes also has, like, no overt expression unless you're actively molesting your outerwear in the process or something. Which, y'know. Don't do that. An external observer in a social setting shouldn't be able to tell, with either of those. Probably why they're recommend.

Breathing and muscle control in general has definitely helped me with high stress situations in the past, though, sure. I probably would never have been able to start driving without it.

[dragdeler]

-

[methylatedspirit]

How hard-coded is sexuality? Is it entirely biological, or is there an environmental factor to it? If it's at least partially environmental, at what point does it lock in? To avoid sounding like an ass, I know that attempting to remove the gay from someone is futile at best, and a hate crime at worst, so the answer to that last question is likely to be either "there is no environmental factor; not applicable" or "really early".