Beauty in numbers
Statistics and numbers can be pretty boring. Long lists of numbers or charts showing lots of wavy wiggly lines with no meaning.
But numbers and figures can be made more interesting. It’s all about using the right data visualisation to show the information behind the figures.
For instance Florence Nightingale invented the Polar Area Diagram to highlight the causes of deaths in the Crimean War. She used the diagrams to explain to members of parliament and civil servents why medical care was needed.
Looking at the data behind the diagram above, a heatmap, you’ll find tables and tables of numbers. You could draw umpteen different charts and but they wouldn’t highlight the information about the way births are spread out across the year.
From the heatmap it becomes very easy for the human brain to spot certain patterns. You’ll notice that September is a very popular month for babies to be born. Great information if you sell anything to do with births and babies. And working back 9 months takes you to December. A cold month when everyone is snuggling up and keeping warm and drinking and partying a lot too. It is obviously leading to a lot of hanky panky for young couples.
But can you spot some other patterns in the heatmap? Whats going on on the 13th of every month. What about the gap in the month of July? Bear in mind that the data is taken from America.
SBML
Heatmap from Visual News.
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June 4, 2012 at 10:57 -
Fascinating, and a brilliant way of showing trends and patterns. My take:
July = October and the nights are drawing in. Nothing on the telly, so …
September = Christmas and New Year drunkenness
4/5 July = clever first-world management of late pregnancy to avoid inconveniencing the doctors over the holiday period
13 = similar for the superstitious.
I’m reminded of that huge spike in births nine months after the city-wide power cut in New York in 1977.
Great post.
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2
June 4, 2012 at 12:06 -
But numbers and figures can be made more interesting. It’s all about using the right data visualisation to show the information behind the figures.
Anyone who missed Hans Rosling’s documentary The Joy of Stats should hunt it down. Even I – to whom the words “bar chart” inspire thoughts of a map of all the best places to drink in an area – left it enthusiastic about mathematics.
Here‘s his TED talks, to whet the appetite.
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June 4, 2012 at 12:07 -
You want data visualisation? I’ll give you data visualisation…
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/data_visualation
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4
June 4, 2012 at 13:57
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5
June 4, 2012 at 12:41 -
Then if you are a climatologist you can make ‘Mann made global warming’ by forcing your data to produce a hockey stick which causes governments to spend trillions of tax money on a scam.
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June 4, 2012 at 12:46 -
That oddity on the 13th is pretty wild. Are there really that many superstitious mothers out there who would try to hold a birth back or push one out to avoid the date? Do they conspire with hospital doctors to lie about the date? Strange.
It’s also strange that no one seems to be having sex in April! Whatever happened to springtime love? January is birth poor from beginning to end!
– MJM
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June 4, 2012 at 13:33 -
Makes sense if you think about it in terms of the age-old agricultural cycle. The most convenient time to have more mouths to feed is when the harvest is brought in and the food stores are plentiful—that is, late summer. And after the harvest is brought in, it’s cold, and there’s little to do, then you get busy—late autumn. Thus all the sex in Oct/Nov/Dec and all the babies in Jul/Aug/Sep.
Maybe it’s not a conscious thing and is, instead, to do with the nights drawing in as above, but hey, it might be left over in the hindbrain or something.
And maybe nobody is getting busy in April because, in their ancestral memories, they’re all out planting the harvest and don’t have time.
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June 4, 2012 at 15:21 -
What proportion of US births are elective caesarian ones? Appointments would not be offered for 4th July and might be avoided by the superstitious for 13th of a month. Unfortunately the data is incomplete and so we can’t test the first part of the hypothesis for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
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