Tag: vegetarianism

How infographics can lose the plot

By this point it should’ve become apparent to most people who engage with infographics on a semi-regular basis that there are some rules about what they should or shouldn’t look like, and that your canvas isn’t actually infinite in terms of what you can create that will a) look good and b) make sense. But just when you think everyone’s going to create sane visualisations of data, there comes along one absolute trash-fire of an infographic to remind you that there are still people out there who can and will ruin your day. And when that someone is a media channel the size of News18, the issue at hand actually transforms from being a molehill to a mountain.

Because it’s News18, it’s no longer just about following good practices when making an infographic but also about moving the hundreds of thousands of people who will have seen the infographic (@CNNnews18 has 3.4 million followers) away from the idea that News18’s effort produced something legitimate. It’s like you and your squad are guiding a group of people quietly through a jungle at night, almost unseen, when an idiot decides he has to smoke a joint, lights his match, gives your position away to the enemy and you all get killed. To the wider world, you were all idiots – but only you will know that things would’ve been rosier if it hadn’t been for that junkie (and spare me your consternation about what a lousy analogy this is). Without further ado, the trash-fire:

Fonts and colours, not bad, but that’s it. Here’s what’s wrong:

  1. The contours of the chicken-leg and the leaf appear to have dictated the positioning of numbers and lines in the graphic, whereas it should’ve been the other way around
  2. The same length represented by 25% for Rajasthan also signifies 31% and 33% for Haryana and Punjab, respectively
  3. The states (in the graphic) from Bihar to Telangana all have less than 10% on the veg side – but the amount of leafy area would suggest these values are much higher than actual
  4. If anything, West Bengal and Telangana are the worst offenders: the breadth of leaf they have for their measly 1% is longer than that of Rajasthan’s 25%
  5. The numbers say that only 4/21 states have more vegetarians than non-vegetarians – but a glance would suggest that fraction’s closer to 13/21
  6. Also: wtf are these irregular shapes? Why not just pick regular rectangles and shade them accordingly?

In fact, across the board (of mistakes), it seems the designer may have forgotten or ignored just one guiding principle of all infographics: that they should give a clear and accurate impression of the truth as represented by the numbers. This often requires the designer to ensure that the axes are clearly visible, that representations of values through parameters like distance, area, volume, etc. are consistent and predictable throughout the graphic, that the representation of relative values is proportionate, that colours and/or stylisations don’t mislead the reader, etc.

These are the reasons why the ‘3D’ pie-chart offered by MS Powerpoint hasn’t found wider use. It offers nothing at all in addition to the normal ‘flat’ pie-chart but actually make things worse by distorting how the values are displayed. Similarly, you take one look at this chicken-leaf thing and you take away… nothing. You need to look at it again, closer each time, toss the numbers around a bit if they make sense, etc. It’s really just an attention-whore of an infographic, to be used as bait with which to trawl Twitter for a flamewar around the Indian government’s recent attitude towards the consumption of meat, especially beef.

Also: “So what if it’s a little off the mark to get some attention? It’s done its job, right?” → if this is your question, then the answer is that if you don’t force designers – especially those working with journalists – to follow best practices when making an infographic, you’ll be setting a lower bar that will soon turn around and assault you with all kinds of charts and plots conceived to hide what the numbers are really saying and instead massage your preconceived biases while playing up ‘almost-right’ propaganda. Yes, infographics can quickly and effectively misguide, especially when you don’t have much time to spend scrutinising it. Hell, isn’t that why infographics were invented in the first place: to let you take one look at a visualisation and get a good idea of what’s going on? This is exactly why there’s a lot of damage done when you’re screwing with infographics.

So DON’T DO IT.

Curious Bends – macaroni scandal, bilingual brain, beef-eating Hindus and more

1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala

“‘Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wheat flour and looks like bits of onion leaves, reedy, hollow, but white in colour.’ This paragraph appears in a piece titled: “Ta-Pi-O-Ca Ma-Ca-Ro-Ni: Eight Syllables That Have Proved Popular In Kerala”. Readers, I am not making this up. For a few years, from around 1958 to 1964, food scientists in India were obsessed with tapioca macaroni. Originally called synthetic rice, it was developed by the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) in Mysore as a remedy for the problems of rice shortage, especially in the southern states.” (4 min read, livemint.com)

2. China is using Pakistan as a place to safety test its nuclear power technology

“Pakistan’s plans to build two nuclear reactors 40 kilometres from the bustling port city of Karachi, a metropolis of about 18 million people has become a bone of contention between scientists and the government. They are to be built by the China National Nuclear Corporation. Each reactor is worth US$4.8 billion and the deal includes a loan of US$6.5 billion from a Chinese bank. These reactors have never been built or tested anywhere, not even in China. If a Fukushima or a Chernobyl-like disaster were to take place, evacuating Karachi would be impossible, says a leading Pakistani physicist. He argues that building these nuclear reactors may have significant environmental, health, and social impacts.” (6 min read, scidev.net)

3. Speaking a second language may change how you see the world

“Cognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you think since the 1940s. The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number of studies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certain features of the world. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers, for example. And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by material rather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Still, skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect cultural differences between speakers that are unrelated to language.” (4 min read, sciencemag.org)

4. Nobel-prize winning biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan named president of the Royal Society​

“Ramakrishnan grew up in India and has spent the majority of his research career in the United States, moving to the United Kingdom in 1999. He has a diverse scientific background: he switched to biology after a PhD in physics. “That breadth is something I hope will help me,” he says.” (3 min read, nature.com)

5. History is proof most Hindus never had any beef with beef

“To achieve this goal, the RSS has, among other things, turned beef into a Muslim-Hindu issue. So the ban on beef is a device to create a monolithic Hindu community? Yes. You also have to ask the question: When did the idea of not eating beef and meat become strong? Gandhi was essentially a Jain; he campaigned for cow protection as well as vegetarianism. It was Gandhi’s campaign that took vegetarianism to non-Brahmin social groups that were meat-arian. The only people who were not really influenced by Gandhi’s cow protection campaign and vegetarianism were Muslims, Christians and Dalits. If the Dalits were not affected, it was because Ambedkar immediately started a counter-campaign.” (8 min read, scroll.in)

Chart of the week

“Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.” (4 min read, economist.com)

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