Neal Levene noticed something fishy with a recent collection of maps illustrating the effects of the H1N1 (Swine) Flu virus across the world, released by InformationIsBeautiful. He dug deeper and found a bad combination of typos, inconsistencies, and poor choices in representation.
Note, there was a typo in the first map that I did not see until I saw it in the table. The UK value on the first map should have been 13,095 versus 13,019. When I sorted the table data, I was confused when both countries had exactly the same number of cases. I corrected the data in the table at the top of this post. This is a trivial example of how the graphical elements (unnecessary in my opinion) distract from seeing the data. In the third map, there are only 5 data points instead of six. It was very clear in the table, not so clear in the map.
@Neal Levene
Glad to hear it! Yours is part of mine as well!
Yikes – I love the site Information is Beautiful, but I do think that the maps were a poor choice in representing this data set.
By the way, your site is part of my daily reading. Great work!!!