Reading a Picture

Visual storytelling

Visualising data helps understanding facts.
Sometimes it’s very easy to understand a graph; sometimes it’s necessary to read it and to study it to discover unknown territory.

Such graphs are little masterpieces. Here’s one of these and I am sure the authors had more than one iteration and discussion while creating it.
The graph tells the story of the average disposable income and savings of households in Switzerland, published by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office FSO.

The authors kindly give a short explanation:

How to read this graph.
In one-person households aged 64 or under, the upper-income group has a disposable income of CHF 8487 per month and savings of CHF 2758 per month. Representing 4.0% of all households, this income group corresponds to a fifth of one-person households aged 64 or under (20.1%)

There’s another nice graph, a little bit less elaborated, also explained by the authors:

Statistics ♥

But there’s one thing that is not explained:

the confidence interval!

‘A confidence interval gives an estimated range of values which is likely to include an unknown population parameter, the estimated range being calculated from a given set of sample data,‘ and the above poverty data are from a sample of ‘approximately 7000 households, i.e. more than 17,000 persons who are randomly selected…’.
Or:
‘The confidence intervals for the mean give us a range of values around the mean where we expect the “true” (population) mean is located (with a given level of certainty, see also Elementary Concepts). ….. as we all know from the weather forecast, the more “vague” the prediction (i.e., wider the confidence interval), the more likely it will materialize. Note that the width of the confidence interval depends on the sample size and on the variation of data values…..’

Khan Academy gives lectures about topics like confidence intervals, sampling, etc.

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Which one ?

The above graphs use just one of multiple possibilities for visualising data.

Severino Ribecca’s Data Visualisation Catalogue is one of many websites trying to give an overview. And there’s the risk to get lost in these compilations.

                            © listverse.com

Ever worried about your SVG graphics?

Not any more. Yesterday Microsoft published their fourth platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 – the last browser to get native SVG support – and I am here to tell you that it renders a lot of SVG content as was intended, right out of the box, the only caveat being: your box must be at least Windows Vista.

Check it out for yourself e.g. with this Price Kaleidoscope you might have seen at some conferences.

If you’re stuck with WindowsXP in your office and wonder when this ubiquitous SVG world will come to a desk near you, you might be interested in SVG in Internet Explorer, a paper about possible transition strategies.