Most hilarious graph i've seen in a while. I guess this tells us how much water an entire city taking syncronized bathroom breaks uses.
almost 2 years ago
Ubiquitous
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Hahaha thats awesome, how the hell did you come across this? lol
"Its always Miller Time
Whens it gonna be Sabres-Offense Time?"
- by Jsz on Mar 3, 2010 6:25 PM PST
Note the left side of the graph
Their “zero” is actually 300ML and their top is at 500ML so the spikes in water consumption are far, far less severe in reality than you would be led to believe by the graph. If you set the top of the graph at 1000ML and the bottom at 0ML, you could argue just as well that the game only had a very minor effect on water consumption.
This graph is a perfect example about how to present statistical information to highlight a particular talking point even when the statistics don’t firmly support the argument.
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
a 20% change in either direction isn’t a lot? (Also, those are Megaliters, if anyone is wondering.)
You can see by the green line (when there was no olympic hockey games during those times) that overall water usage did not change from the previous day, it just happened to be concentrated into certain intervals.
Those are HUGE spikes in a city water usage graph as normally they’d be very similiar for every weekend day (weekdays would probably have a different trend). I’d personally like to compare it to other types of big events, like a gold medal curling match, or an oilers playoff game.
of course, it also shows that even when over 80% of the city is watching the same thing, there’s still a lot of water being used.
Not even the Toronto Maple Leafs could kill my optimism
Free Tyler Ennis!
It is a lot...
…however the graph was laid out in a way to give the appearance that consumption dropped to virtually nothing during the game when that was clearly untrue. If you were to give just a cursory glance at this graph, would your mind see the small print on the left with the scale or would it see the grossly exaggerated spikes? Of course you saw the spikes. That is why the creator of the graph made the scale what he did. He WANTED you to exaggerate the data spikes in order to support the argument that there were enormous shifts in water consumption. If he wanted to show that there was very little difference in water consumption, he would have chosen a different scale and could have done so just as effectively.
Another example of how to lie with graphs can be found in the link below. Section 3 is the relevant one for this particular style.
http://www.bized.co.uk/timeweb/buffing/buff_lie_illus.htm
"I could have conquered Europe, all of it, but I had women in my life." - King Henry II of England
A general rule of graphmaking is that the plotted lines should use up roughly 2/3 of the space. That is the general standard by which the axis scales are set. As long as it is labeled, it is not unethical to do so. I think there’s a fine line between effective representation of data and intentionally exaggerated data. If the axis scale was unlabeled I’d agree with you, but since its pretty clearly labeled and follows the standard 2/3 principle you can’t be too upset about it.
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