The Art of the Chart - Visualizing Comparisons

April 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

My graphic design talents fall in the leftward tail of the distribution.* So I have great admiration for those who can make data visually accessible, and especially for those who improve on existing visualizations.

Here is a chart The Economist posted showing how people in six different countries allocated their time.

(Click on the graphic for a larger view.)

This was of interest to me since I had once posted (here) about US-France differences in time spent at meals. I tried to see if the data confirmed what I had said then. But finding the relevant numbers wasnct easy.

Enter Andrew Gelman. After only a few minutes (well, hours actually), he took the original data, translated the hours from absolute to relative – above or below the mean – and created this chart . . .

(Click on the graphic for a larger view).
. . . which allows for much easier comparisons among the six** countries.

The full post is here and includes a link to the R code for the chart.

* My students complained in class that my writing on the board was illegible. Montclair students rarely voice their displeasure to the instructor. They may grumble among themselves about their teachers, but that, however much they may grumble among themselves about their teachers,s usually as far as it goes. So when they spoke up in class, I knew things were seriously bad.

** Why Turkey, you may ask. I have no idea, and The Economist isn’t saying.

Easter Parade 2011

April 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The public rituals of Easter are not about the Passion, just as most public Christmas rituals have little to do with the birth of Jesus. The song “Easter Parade” (written by the same Jew who wrote “White Christmas”) is all about hats and photographers. That was over a half-century ago. Some things don’t change.

(Click on a picture for a larger view.)

That creation on the right was not the only house hat, but that theme was not as common as bunnies or eggs . . .

or, especially, flowers.

The above scene is on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which celebrated its celebrated mass. Outside, things were much more secular (apparently, what happens in St. Patrick’s stays in St. Patrick’s).

Men too wore hats.
And some of the guys dressed up in fancy suits to pose for the photographers.

This woman had her arms tattooed to match her skirt.

I did see one religious message, but even that one added a somewhat post-Biblical context.

New York City does not do much officially for Easter. The police wear their traditional hats.


But in Rockefeller Plaza, you could get this view of 30 Rock.
I hope all readers of the Socioblog had a wonderful Easter.

Compulsory Fun

April 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I don’t want a ‘fun’ beer,” said my father. (This was a long time ago.)

It took me a second, but I realized he was talking about the ad that had just been on the radio. I had mentally tuned out the commercial – background noise between innings in a ball game broadcast – and I was far too young to drink beer. But I knew the jingle (“ . . . blended into one beer / a light, bright, fun beer . . “). I had just never thought about the words. Now my father had pointed out their absurdity. What is a fun beer anyway? More to the cultural point, why must a beer be fun?

In last week’s New Yorker (April 18, here, gated), Yiyun Li has a short piece about her first months in the US as a graduate student in Iowa. What astonished her at first was the lighting -- every place was well lit, and Americans left lights on all the time. That and fun. “Be there or be square,” said the instructional voice on her four-cassette course in American English. The phrase did not turn out to be especially useful.

No one told me to “be there or be square,” but everyone I met, it seemed, expected me to have fun.
Her science adviser (“Have fun”), the nurse she saw regularly because she had not passed the TB skin test (“Have a good time”), and a sorority mother who
asked repeatedly, “Did you have fun?” after I visited the sorority house and dined with her girls.
Cultural help for foreign students also included a midnight to 3 a.m. ride-around in a police cruiser.
In parting, I said goodbye to the officer, and he wished me “a fun time in America.”
Not all cultures think so highly of fun, and I don’t just mean dour dictatorships and theocracies. In France, for example, as people mature into their late teens and beyond, they are supposed to become sérieux. Those stereotypical left-bank students deep in philosophical discussions. But look at the pictures here on US students’ dorm-room doors and on the walls of their rooms and Facebook pages. The dominant value is fun. The snapshots, with their laughter and exuberance and ubiquitous red plastic cups, proclaim the ideal: we are wild and crazy guys.

Fun is a newcomer in the house of American values. I doubt deToqueville had much to say about it. The Google Ngram chart shows fun rising steadily to mid-century, then declining briefly in the 1950s only to zoom in the 1980s.
(Click on the chart for a larger view)

The first academic mention I know of is Martha Wofenstein’s 1951“fun morality” article (in the context of the Ngram chart, it now seems unusually prescient).
A recent development in American culture is the emergence of what we may call “fun morality.” Here fun, from having been suspect if not taboo, has tended to become obligatory. Instead of feeling guilty for having too much fun, one is inclined to feel ashamed if one does not have enough.
It often takes an outsider to see the obvious. I didn’t notice all those fun messages flowing in the media. But Martha Wolfenstein and my father did – they both had come of age in a pre-fun America. Then, forty-five years after Wolfenstein’s article, a Chinese girl arrives in the American heartland.
What a strange country, I thought, where fun, like good lighting, seemed mandatory.

Change Blindness II

April 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As a sequel to yesterday’s post on change blindness, here’s a card trick by Richard Wiseman – magician, psychologist, and blogger. He’s the one on the left. And he stays that way. But watch the trick, and see how observant you are.



I quickly guessed (correctly) how the card trick was done, but just as I was thinking how clever I was not to have been fooled, the video pointed out my change blindness.