Archive: Oct 2010

Trick or Treat

This post has nothing to do with sociology. It offers proof that I should probably learn to leave things alone sometimes.

Recipes

I have long had this hunch that recipes would be better depicted not as lists of ingredients stacked upon lists of instructions but as something more well-integrated. I have many times forgotten an ingredient or messed up an instruction, and I like to think that better graphic design might be able to get me out of this problem. Professional cooks already tend to know which ingredients require what kind of process within certain recipes. For instance, when making cookies, the first step almost always involves creaming the sugars and fats together. But if you didn’t know this and you were used to making cakes (in which the wet and dry ingredients are kept separate from one another), you might absentmindedly tally up all the dry ingredients with your fats when making cookies. That would be a mistake.

So I found the recipe diagram above which is based on the Nassi-Shneiderman structured flowchart and thought it was worthy of consideration.

But…

I wasn’t thrilled with it. In particular, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many separate ‘mix’ steps when some of those ingredients could clearly be mixed in all at the same time. I also wasn’t all that keen with the way the heating instructions were handled. I was also perplexed at the way in which the graham cracker crust was just thrown out there as an ingredient – most people make this from scratch (but I don’t have the ratios for that on hand so I didn’t try to rough them in lest someone actually use this as real recipe).

Here is my modification of the diagram, in grayscale even though I know it would look snazzy in color.

I still have difficulties with this diagram – where are the instructions? “Mix” is too broad a term. The other problem is that I still need to incorporate mention of tools into the diagram. This is related to the lack of instructions generally – if it said ‘hand mixer’ and ‘medium speed mix’ that would be clear enough for me. There has to be a good way to list ‘spring form pan’ in the graham cracker crust box, too. I could have just tools into the text, but that seemed to be cheating on the graphic sensibilities of the diagram. If there is a reason to be listing tools, one should have a place to put them outside the mention of instructions. That’s my biggest problem with recipes – all of the tools, times, temperatures, techniques, and ingredients are mashed together.

What needs work

I am not convinced that further modifications to the Nassi-Shneiderman flowchart are going to solve my problems. There has to be a better way to depict recipes that can provide the overview at a glance – including tools – but that doesn’t sacrifice all of the necessary details.

References

John. (2005) Key’s Corner Blog

Shneiderman, Ben. (2003, May) A Short History of Structured Flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams) Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.

What Works

Before you read any further, ask yourself which one of these graphs is most useful. Which one has the most information? If you had to get rid of one of them but still be able to explain the basic flows of people into the US over the last century, which one would you keep? And would your story be much weaker, somewhat weaker, pretty much the same after the loss of one of the graphs?

First, I was moaning the other day about a graphic – like the one I posted recently about prescriptions for treating mental illness in the US – in which color is used to make it look like there is important information being encoded when, in fact, the colors are just pretty, nothing more. I am happy to report that in this case, the colors are not only useful, but necessary. Try to imagine looking at this thing in gray scale. It would be nearly impossible to read. So kudos for color in general. In specific, I probably would have tried to group the countries that are near each other in the world within a color family. Sweden and Norway are good examples of what I would have done throughout – they are both green, just different shades. That makes good logical sense. On the other hand, Ireland and the UK are not in the same color family and it confuses me. I also don’t see great geographic or other similarities between Canada/Mexico and China. So I would have kept the Canada and Mexico as they are and found a different color for China.

Now I’m going to get back to the question I asked at the beginning of the post: could you do without one of these graphics if you had to axe one? It’s a leading question and the answer is clearly: yes. The first one is far better than the second one. Looking at absolute flows by country of origin gives a much more interesting and fully articulated picture than looking at the relative values of people coming at any one point in time.

What Needs Work

The numbers behind this graph were pulled from Census Data, a good place to go because they are the most reliable numbers we are likely to find (at least with respect to legal immigration – undocumented immigration is, well, undocumented so the Census doesn’t help). However, the thing about Census Data is that it’s going to show us flows for a decade at a time and I wonder if it might be a little misleading to show these numbers as an augmented line graph. A bar graph might be better and here’s why: smoothing the lines implies decade reliant time trends that don’t exist. Unfortunately, in the real world, important decisions do not always take place in the same year the census is taken. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was right between decades. Now I know you’re thinking something along the lines, ‘anyone who studies immigration is going to know when that reform act was and when WWI, WWII, the Depression, and all sorts of other important historical events took place. we’re not idiots.’. I agree; you are not idiots.

On the other hand, if I were to create this as a bar graph, I would have the freedom to actually locate the legislation as a graphic element – a line flying a flag announcing the name of the act, for instance – right between the bars for 1960 and 1970. But of course, that would make it difficult to see how the flows are changing over time, so I might superimpose a kind of shadow version of the current line graph over (or under) the bars so that the eye can be aided in its path from one bar to the next. Line graphs do show change much better. But I like the idea of being explicit with the time periods in which the measurements occur and with the notion of leaving graphical space to add important contextual details.

This graphic was created by Thomas Brown using IBM’s free Many Eyes visualization tool. I wholeheartedly support IBM and the other companies and organizations that are making powerful visualization tools available for free. In case you aren’t familiar with them, they allow users to input data and then they take that data and produce visual representations of it. In this case, the full version of the graph is interactive – hovering the mouse will reveal greater detail about any given flow at a point in time. This is a great thing. I support layering of information. The layering available at Many Eyes does not quite make up for the inability to layer in the way that I described above, but I’m not disappointed with IBM. There are already tools for manipulating graphics. The best way to use IBM’s tool is not to expect it to do everything, but to take their visualizations and then further enhance them in photoshop or your favorite image editing software.

Also Note

This graphic is about spaces but it is not a map. For whatever reason, people use maps whenever there is mention of geography, and even sometimes when there isn’t, even though the map is often not adding to the story and making it harder to immediately grok what the important patterns are. Just because geography or mobility might be part of the story you are trying to tell, it isn’t necessary to use a map to encode your narrative visually.

References

Thomas F. Brown. Immigrant Origins via email on 11 October 2010.

IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization tool.

US Census Historical Statistics for Immigration by Number and Rate and Immigration by Leading Country or Region of Last Residence.

What works

Um, so, I’m trying to think of what is working here. I guess we see that there are about 10 psychiatric drugs, that lots of people appear to be receiving treatment for anxiety (heck, two wars, an economic crisis, trapped Chilean miners, BP’s oil spill…all this anxiety makes sense to me). We are meant to believe that this represents a huge and possibly stifling example of big pharma. But really, this graphic doesn’t say that to me. It says “lots of people are anxious and choosing to take prescription drugs to cope”.

What needs work

Just for some crazy antic fun, infographic style, I whipped out my digital crop tool and got rid of the map just to see what we would lose. Clearly, we lose some fun. Almost all the pretty colors are gone. But the information? It’s all still there. The map was being used as a giant and rather useless crutch in this case. This is a particularly egregious case, but there are many instances of maps that don’t encode any information that is useful for the debate of the topic at hand. Ask yourself: what did the map do? Was there any variation contained in the map? Was the dataset in question geographically oriented in any way? No. No, it was not.

Thanks to Austin Haney, Sociology grad student at Kent State for sending this our way.

References

Drugged Culture GOOD magazine, Transparency Blog.

(2010) One Nation Under Xanax in Psychiatric Times.

What Works

I have been posting about marriage lately and I thought I would take a break from that, but stick with the relationship topic. If you haven’t discovered the blog at OKCupid, I highly recommend heading over. With a strong mathematical background, the folks at OKCupid are thrilled to take their users’ likes, dislikes, and reported behaviors, run the stats, and provide us with the infographics. I promise it will be worth your while to head over…later on in the post where I located the pie charts above, there is a quote which I am reposting here because I thought it was the most hilarious reference to Karl Marx that I’ve encountered in a very long time:

According to Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp, who wrote a piece for Contexts called “Straight Girls Kissing”, homosexual experimentation in the US is possible for women in a way that it is not for men. At first glance, much of the ‘straight girls kissing’ going on at bars and fraternity parties appears to be a rather perverse appropriation of female sexuality for the visual pleasure of men. The history of the male gaze is so entrenched here that anything sexual going on with women is assumed to be for men, even when the sexual behavior is homosexual – especially if it is done in public as spectacle. [Note: If the girls kissing get so into it that they appear to be ignoring the male attention altogether, they do risk social sanctioning laced with homophobic slurs. So straight girls kissing better make sure they maintain some kind of connection to heteronormative behavior or they could, I don’t know, have beer poured all over them. See Rupp and Taylor.] What this means is that women who have experience with other women do not necessarily fall outside of the category ‘heterosexual’ which for many women, makes the experimentation seem quite a bit safer than if they felt that any homoerotic behavior would automatically queer their social sexuality. The same is not true for men.

Rupp and Taylor found that ‘straight girls kissing’ is not just another example of girls gone wild trying to get male’s attention by flaunting ‘extreme’ sexuality. In interviews, many of the women involved reported that at least some of the instances of their public encounters with other women opened up the possibility for them to explore their self-generated (rather than crowd-generate) attractions to other women. OKCupid’s report indicates that having this culturally condoned space to get out there and try kissing girls without risking the stigma of being labeled lesbian allows a fair number of women to have enjoyable encounters with other women. What’s more, a fair proportion of the women who haven’t done it feel like they are missing out.

If our heteronormative culture could relax the rigid classification of male sexuality to afford the same kind of bi-curious space for men, maybe they would feel more free to experiment with other men and enjoy themselves.

What needs work

I hate pie charts. I would have rather seen this one as a set of bar graphs – the ‘tried it and liked it’ in the same color as the ‘haven’t tried it but want to do it’. Then the ‘never, and don’t want to’ can be lumped with the ‘tried it and didn’t like it’. Though I do wonder if the ‘tried it and didn’t like it’ might have been specific to the person they were trying it with on that occasion. It would be useful to know if those people would try it again.

Humor

I found the quote below so funny that I laughed out loud in the class where I was supposed to be serving as a TA rather than as an internet surfer. The class is taught by Paula England about Sex and Love in Modern Society, so looking at OKCupid’s blog was right on topic, but still. Laughing in class distracts the students.

“Religion is the opiate of the masses, so long as the masses are straight. However, amass a bunch of lesbians and you’re going to need actual drugs.”

Before anyone gets angry and posts to my blog, take a deep breath. Is it possible that straight people are claiming to be lesbians and then reporting drug use just to make lesbians look drugged out on OKCupid? Yes. But that’s a stretch. Is it possible that lesbians feel pressure to report being adventurous, thereby indicating an openness to drug use, if not actual use? Yes, it’s possible that they are reporting more drugs than they’re actually using or that they are the only honest people on OKCupid and all the straight people and gay men are under-reporting drug use. My point is that twisting Marx around like that was sociology nerd humor at it’s best.

OKCupid’s numbers come from 3.2 million dating profiles. Dating profiles may not be the place you’ll find soul-searching truths. However, what we do find are the embellishments people adopt to make their actual selves slouch closer to their ideal selves so as to attract their ideal mates.

References

Rupp, Leila and Taylor, Verta. (Summer 2010) Straight Girls Kissing Contexts Magazine.

Rudder, Christian. (12 October 2010) Gay vs. Straight Sex. OKCupid Blog.

Bad title

Why draw attention only to the fathers? Clearly there must be quite a few unmarried mothers out there as well. I hope this isn’t suggesting that deciding to take a relationship into marriage is somehow only or primarily the man’s responsibility. Both women and men have agency around the marital decision. It would be nice if cultural constructs supported equal opportunity for popping the question…but headlines that emphasize men’s agency over women aren’t going to get us any closer to equality on that front.

What works

It’s nice to see that this graph points out where definitions of racial categories change. It is also nice that it draws attention to the problem that many American children are being born into poverty or at least situations where resources are extremely constrained. In another graph elsewhere, the same group also reminds us that these births are largely NOT happening to teen parents.

The other critical point is that out of wedlock births are on the rise even though birth rates for teen mothers are declining. If in the past it was possible to think that the problem is just that teens are out having unprotected sex that leads to accidental births, we can no longer be so sure that this is what is happening. Age at first sex is decreasing which means that most of the people having children out of wedlock are capable of having sex without getting pregnant. They probably have been doing just that for years. Having children out of wedlock is best understood to be a choice, then, not an accident. Any efforts to prevent child poverty are probably not going to be successful if they rest on sex ed or free condoms (though I personally believe those things are important for other reasons). The American Heritage Foundation believes that if people would just get married, these kids wouldn’t be born into poverty. Others aren’t so sure it’s that simple.

What needs work

The problem with the write-up accompanying this chart is that it implies that the causal mechanism goes something like this: for whatever reason couples have children together but do not get married. The failure to get married means that these children will be far more likely to be raised in poor or impoverished conditions. For emphasis, I’ll restate: the parents’ failure to marry one another leads to children being raised in poverty.

Now. Here’s what I have to say about the chart. First, if that is the message, why not depict the out-of-wedlock birth rate by poverty status, preferably poverty status prior to pregnancy? I’d settle for poverty status at some set time – like the child’s birth or first birthday, but that isn’t as good. I feel like showing these numbers by race is subtly racist, implying that race matters here when what really matters is poverty, at least according to the story that they are telling and the story that many marriage scholars care about. Yes, it is true that poverty and racial status (still) covary rather tightly in America, but if the story being told is about poverty, I’d like to see the chart address that directly rather than through the lens of race. Furthermore, if race DOES matter, where are Asians? American Indians?

Moving away from the chart for a moment and getting back to the causal story, marriage researcher Andrew Cherlin finds that the causal arrow might go the other way. Being poor may be a critical factor in preventing folks from getting married. William Julius Wilson was an earlier proponent of this concept, especially with respect to poor African Americans. His work suggested that during and after the post-industrial decline in urban manufacturing jobs, African American men were systematically excluded from the work force and this made them appear to be poor marital material. Cherlin’s more recent work applies more broadly, not specifically to African American men, and bolsters the idea that marriage is something Americans of all backgrounds feel they shouldn’t get into until they are economically comfortable. What ‘comfortable’ means varies a lot, but most people like to have steady full-time jobs, they like to be confident that they won’t get evicted, that the heat or electricity will not be turned off, that they will have enough to eat.

The more important question would be: why don’t these assumptions apply to having children? Whereas getting married can represent an economic gain if you are marrying a working spouse, having children certainly does not (state subsidies do not cover the full cost of having children no matter how little the children’s parents make). Perhaps what we are faced with is people for whom getting married may not represent an economic gain. Marrying a person without a steady job could present more of a drain on your resources than staying single, whether or not you have kids.

What Works

This could easily be applied to just about all research, not just bench science.

What needs work

Why is it that the media believe their consumers to be so daft? Where did the sound bite come from and what has it done to the production of news? To the practice of scientific research?

What is missing from this depiction of the research ‘cycle’ is that some researchers interpret the pressure to turn complex reality into a series of sensational sound bites as a sign that they should alter the way that they write up results in order to better fit the media’s model of dissemination. It’s hard to say this is always a bad thing – if it means that scientists actively seek a more active role in the dissemination of their work in order to pursue a real discourse, it can be a good thing. If it means that researchers promote their results in a skewed fashion, fail to fully disclose/discuss the conditions in which their findings will hold, or start choosing projects based on what will be more likely to make the news, then this science news cycle can be sincerely detrimental.

What Works

Imagine looking at this information in a table. It would get the job done, but it wouldn’t have as much visual legibility as this graphic does. One thing I like about the graphic is that the illustrator was not impeded by the fact that sometimes there were ties for tallest or shortest. He just kept to the same paired down one tallest/one shortest depiction.

What needs work

I would have loved to see some indication of mean height. Does it fall in the middle, does the mean cluster towards the top? Does it cluster towards the bottom for some sports (like women’s gymnastics)? Even more interesting would have been changes over time. The human population has been getting taller on average so one would expect that athletes are also getting taller. But maybe some are not, like those in sports where the age of professionals is dropping (ahem, women’s gymnastics).

My apologies for the quality of the image – the scanner is refusing service this morning.

References

Lee, Jason. [illustration] (2010, 18 October) “High-Low: some all-time tallest and shortest athletes” in ESPN The Magazine. p. 64.

Macur, Juliet. (2008, 9 August) The Teeny Tiny Matter of Age for China’s Gymnasts in The New York Times: Olympics 2008 Supplement.

Comments Closed

Regular readers, I had to close the comments on this post because I was getting spam comments faster than I could delete them (online gambling, mostly). If you are keen on commenting, email me and I will find a way to make sure your comments are heard. Wonder what the key word was that made this particular post such a spam magnet? Athlete? ESPN? Who can say.

Giving Credit Where It Is Due

This graphic was created by Andrew Price for GOOD Magazine, inspired by a paper written by Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Daniel Norton (Harvard Business School) entitled “Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time”.

What works

Wealth in America is heavily – extremely – concentrated among people in the top quintile. It’s not that wealthy people have a bit more than the middle class and a lot more than the lowest quintile. No. Wealthy Americans own almost 85% of assets in America. That should be surprising to you because when Ariely and Norton surveyed people to find out how much wealth folks *think* the top quintile owns, they estimate about 58%. Even that inequality is too much, the respondents think. In an ideal world, some inequality is acceptable, but the top quintile of earners should only hold about 32% of America’s wealth. And the bottom quintile would get a slice of the pie too, though at right about 10.5% it’s only one-third as big as the slice at the top. This would be a huge improvement over actual numbers where the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of America’s wealth.

What needs work

I would have put the wealthy people on the right since we usually order things from left to right. And if I were specifically trying to be polemical, I might have rotated the entire graphic and had the wealthy people on top, squeezing everyone else into the smallest possible space, kind of like a trash compactor. But, you know, I’m not trying to be polemical.

If I were trying to be polemical, I might say something along these lines: is it possible that because the bottom of our income distribution usually (though not always) has enough food to eat and a safe place to sleep, maybe even a television and a mobile phone, we have been lulled into thinking that extreme inequality is acceptable? Maybe even that extreme inequality keeps everyone pulling at their own bootstraps, trying to keep up with the Joneses, striving for some impossible future in which folks from the bottom four quintiles might make it into that top quintile? These are blunt numbers barely containing a moral question. In a wealthy society, is eradicating absolute poverty (food, shelter, safety, health care) the most morally responsible way to organize public funds? Is reducing inequality a moral imperative? Or just a bunch of belly-aching by people who should be happy that they can sit around and blog about these things?

Unfortunately, as a society we have not even been able to guarantee even an eradication of absolute poverty, let alone ushered in a debate about the moral implications of pronounced inequality. Morality is not the kind of thing social scientists are supposed to mention. The deep philosophical tenets of what it means to do the right thing are also usually absent from political debates, despite all of the overblown lamentations and soap operatic cases of individual hopes and despairs. There are still many many people who go hungry because they cannot afford to pay rent, buy food, and keep the lights on. There are still many people who cannot access basic preventive health care, either. Weren’t we all raised as children, as religious adherents or good humanists, to help those who cannot help themselves? Well. Americans aren’t so good at that. It’s easier to think that the poor aren’t really that poor (as this chart so bluntly demonstrates), that with food stamps and affordable housing vouchers they seem to be doing just fine. Maybe your neighbor tells you that they someone simultaneously holding a cardboard sign and a mobile phone. The gall of it! How can someone who so obviously has money – they are paying for that phone, aren’t they – be asking for money? When you hear that, think of this chart. Wonder about what it does to a social fabric to have such a vast difference between the wealth of the wealthiest and the poverty of the poorest (Which, by the way, includes many many people who are working. Full-time. Maybe even yourself).

It’s not my place to settle the moral debate about absolute poverty and relative poverty. But it is my place, and the point of this graphic, to raise the question and to make sure that we look at the whole graphic. It’s good to be shocked at how much the top quintile controls. But as Americans in this potpourri of a country together, we spend way too much time marveling at the monstrous wealth and not nearly enough time wondering what might be done about the dire straights of the bottom 40%-60% of us. If the graphic does nothing else, perhaps it shows you who your closest economic neighbors are – and they aren’t the folks to the left.

References

Ariely, Dan and Norton, Michael. (2010) “Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time” forthcoming in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Noren, Laura via Dalton Conley’s Intro to Soc text book: Champagne Glass Distribution of Wealth