Terrible graph of the weekend

Every week, the weekend edition of Le Monde contains a tribune around some statistics and almost irremediably the illustrations are terrible. Witness the one above where the move from 940 millions to more than a billion is completely out of proportions, both for the disk areas and the number of people! Same thing for the split pie chart below:

What’s wrong with a regular pie-chart?! And the increase in disabled planes below is not much better, moving from 5 to 8 plane silhouettes… The illustrators should read Tufte’s books instead of USA Today…!

Ps-I seem to be always picking at Le Monde, but this is only because I have a subscribtion to its weekend edition!

This entry was posted on May 2, 2010 at 2:02 am and is filed under Books, Statistics with tags graphs, junkchart, Le Monde, Statistics, Tufte, USA Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Terrible graph of the weekend”

John Says:
September 30, 2010 at 12:37 pm

There are actually 9 plane silhouettes :P

But yes, they’re pretty shocking.

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Le Monde puzzle [29] « Xi'an's Og Says:
July 29, 2010 at 12:11 am

[…] Although I am not receiving Le Monde magazine by mail any longer (maybe a consequence of highly critical posts?!), I bought it at a newsagent last Saturday and found a fairly easy mathematical puzzle. Or is it […]

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Xi'an's Og