Visual Revelations – Reading Notes(2)

CHAPTER 2 Graphical Mysetires

The greatset value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we has been never expected to see. –John Turkey

Mystery #1: Pregnancires Among !Kung Women

Confusing because:

• Using different symbols to represent different events on a common time scale. Irrelevant events have at least as much visual weight as the theortically important ones.
• Understanding the graph requires memorizing a complex legend and ignoring everything superfluous.

Key:
Use a common metaphor for all the activities.

Mystery #2: The Three Mile Island Accident

Difficult to understand:

• A multiplicity of scales, unusual and unexplained conventions
• A confusing mixture of data types with the same plot.

Improve:

• Remocing the writing, the key and the inset
• Showing the two data sets in separate panels
• Removing the idiosyncrasies
• Correcting hte labels
• Inserting reference lines to aid in matching time periods in the two locations.
  

Mystery #3: The Challenger Disaster

Omits all flight in which there was no such problem( seems low temperature has no any effect)

Show the “zero” entries from the seventeen flights without O-ring incidents.

Add a binonmial-logit function to show low temperatures makes the danger of cold weather launch explicit

Drawing graphs, like motor-car driving and love-making, is one of those activities which almost everyone thinks can be done well with out instruction. The results are of course usually abominable.

CHAPTER 3 Graphical Answers to Scientific Questions

Example 1: Continental Drift

Misconception:

They are in general so complex in nature that direct plotting will receal little about the nature of those law

Example 2: Did Neanderthals Talk Like Pigs?

No :)

Example 3: Armoring Airplanes

Those aircraft hit in the unmarked places had been unable to return, and thus were the areas that required more armor.

Example 4: The Source of a Cholera Epidemic

CHAPTER 4 Three Graphic Memorials

Hear, forget; see, remember

CHAPTER 5 A Nobel Graph

boring

CHAPTER 6 Todai Moto Kuraishi

The chapter title is an ancient Japanese saying:”It is always darkest under the light.”
灯台下暗し

You will easily find that the twenty minutes of extra sleep obtained by preferring the 6:50 train from Paris over the one at 6:30 is paid for by increasing the length of the journey to Lyons by five hours.

• During rush hours, just show up
• During the rest of the day there is a bus every twenty minutes
• Between 1:15 and 5:00 A.M. forget it
  

Just can’t see

CHAPTER 7 Picturing an L.A. Bus Schedule

Same as CHAPTER 6