Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2006/07 - Gruppe 01 - Aufgabe 2

Poor Graphic

Never Bitten, Twice Shy: The Real Dangers Of Summer

Discussion of the original graphic

First impressions of the design

The first thing you notice when looking at this diagramm is: The shark.
Then some graphical symbols on a "line" which seem in a linear relationship. Then you see the horizontal axis, reading "More risk, less fear" on the left and "Less risk, more fear" on the right, which is positioned at the middle of the graphic.
Then finally you get to notice the "numbers" and the legend if you don't get distracted from the nearly unreadable article text in the upper left of the image.

Now we can go on and try to understand the message of the graphic. It shows us 13 risk categorys each with three types of information: odds of injury, odds of death and a "fear index", build on the "number of newspaper articles written last summer" about this risk category.

Bad Data-Ink-Ratio, because of logos and text.
The location of the only axis in the diagram is not making sense. It seems like the first six items are negative in any way.
Order of items? What are the values for x- and y-axis?
The shark-picture is dominant

Detailed analysis of the data

The "The real risks of summer"-data in table form

Risk	Odds of injury¹	Odds of dying	Fear Index²
Skin cancer	1 in 200	1 in 29,500	102
Food poisoning	1 in 800	1 in 55,600	257
Bicycles	1 in 1,700	1 in 578,000	233
Lawn mowers	1 in 5300	Not available	53
Heat exposure	Not available	1 in 950,000	229
Children falling out of windows	1 in 12,800	1 in 2,400,000	89
Lyme disease	1 in 18,100	Not available	47
Fireworks	1 in 32,400	1 in 71,200,000	59
Amusement parks	1 in 34,800	1 in 72,300,000	101
Snake bites	1 in 41,300	1 in 19,300,000	109
Drowning (while boating)	1 in 64,500	1 in 400,900	1,688
West Nile virus	1 in 68,500	1 in 1,000,000	2,240
Shark attacks	1 in 6,000,000	1 in 578,000,000	276

[1]Full row text: Odds of injury requiring medical treatment
[2]Fear index means: Number of newspaper articles written last summer about this risk

At three Items are missing values, but they are still positioned somewhere
Outliers ??? What to write about them
There are three different dimensions of data in the picture, but where does the trend comes from?

** Odds injury
** Odds death
** Number of Articles

Ordering on x- and y-axis seems to be the odds of injury
No correlation to e.g. Number of articles. What should be the "Fear Index"

Better graphic

After taking a closer look at the data, we found out that the main message of the original graphic is not true. We explored the values with different diagrams. A rising odds injury doesn't always cause a higher number of articels. According to this conclusion we can not show the "fear-risk-ratio" in the same way as the source picture does, but we try to visualize the data in a new diagram. Because of the wide spread of the values, we had to use a logarithmic scale.

??? bitte bild hier einfügen ???

As you can see, there is no clear correlation between the different dimensions.