Is your donut chart sending the wrong signals?

Back on July 25, 2009 I blogged about Bullfighting the Mehrabian Myth – a bogus claim about communication (as shown above in a simple horizontal bar chart) that 7% of our meaning is from words, while 38% is from tone of voice, and 55% is from body language.

Those mythical percentages often are illustrated via pie charts (as shown above), or related donut charts. Just because you can do something with PowerPoint (or another graphics program) doesn’t mean that you should.  

The worst donut chart version (shown above) I have seen comes from a Tony Robbins web page titled Are you sending the wrong signals? Compare it to the pie chart shown above, and you will see the angle depicting that 7% for words is larger than it should be. Also shown above is how that angle compares with a right angle, which should represent 25%. It’s almost half! I got out a protractor, and found it represents 12%, while tone of voice actually is 30%, and body language is 58%.

Another poor way to display those three percentages is via an exploded 3-D donut chart, as was done by ToolsHero.

Still another poor way to present the percentages is via a pointless row of three donut charts, as was done on web pages both by MindMaven and Slidemodel.

Yet another way to mess things up is by putting down the wrong percentages, like at Kizan, who had a donut chart saying words were 8% rather than 7%, and tone of voice was 37% rather than 38%.

There also even are pyramid charts, like the one shown at 3:30 in this seven minute YouTube video, which I don't think communicates effectively - it is way less clear than a simple bar chart. 

Table Topics – Tell us about another magazine with a similar title

Table Topics is the impromptu speaking section of a Toastmasters club meeting. Participants give a one-to-two minute answer to a question. One series of questions could involve starting with a title, and asking to tell us about what would be in another magazine with a similar title.

For example, starting with Reader’s Digest we might think of the cartoon character Elmer Fudd, who refers to his nemesis Bugs Bunny as a wabbit, and come up (as shown above) with Weeder’s Digest. Obviously it would be a gardening magazine, and the cover story would be on wascally wabbits and how they want our wutabagas. That title is already used for a gardening newsletter in Washington from the WSU Whatcom County Extension.

Starting with Popular Science we might come up with (as shown above) a paranormal magazine called Popular Séance. It might have articles on topics like how to run a Séance or do a Cold Reading.

At a supermarket checkout counter I saw a copy of Clean Eating, (a questionable concept) which inspired (as shown above) its opposite.

Sears catalogs used to have a selection of products labeled Good, Better and Best (which can be flipped to Bad, Worse, and Worst). The venerable Good Housekeeping magazine could inspire its opposite (as shown above). Similarly, Better Homes and Gardens could inspire the Worse ones.  

Images of Houdini, a chitlins sign, and a back porch all came from Wikimedia Commons.  

A satirical map with over 50 alleged regional terms for carbonated beverages

As shown above, Randall Munroe recently published an xkcd cartoon with an absurdly detailed map of alleged Regional Terms for Carbonated Beverages. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). It is a satire of one by E.D.W. Lynch on June 6, 2013 at Laughing Squid that was titled Soda, Pop, or Coke: Maps of Regional Dialect Variation in the United States. At least that’s what the Explain xkcd web page suggests.  

I grew up in Pittsburgh and lived both in Columbus, Ohio and Ann Arbor, Michigan. While there I heard carbonated beverages called Pop, rather than Medicine. Also, I lived in Portland for 4 years and heard Soda, which didn’t need to be spelled Söde. (One brother-in-law of mine does refer to LaCroix carbonated water as Substance).

There are lots of regional brands of soda, some of which went national. Vernors is a ginger ale from Detroit. My mother liked it when she lived in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Sometime after my dad retired, and they moved to Knoxville, Vernors began selling it there. At a supermarket checkout line someone asked her what flavor that was – and she said it’s great ginger ale. She wrote Vernors to point out their label didn’t then say what it was. Eventually the label changed, and now describes it as The Original Ginger Soda.

      

Randall likely was making fun of clickbait web articles that provide maps or ranked lists on topics such as the Most Reasonably Priced Housing or the Best Places to Retire. For reasonably priced housing Lima, Ohio sometimes pops up. (Lima is roughly 75 miles from both Toledo and Dayton, and best known for the Lima Army Tank Plant which builds the M1 Abrams).

An infographic with almost unreadable sections

At BOSS magazine round this February 12th there was an article titled 6 Tips for beating public speaking anxiety that ended with an infographic from the British presentation design firm Buffalo 7. The infographic originally appeared on May 25, 2016 in another article at their web site titled as How to overcome presentation anxiety. Those tips were Nerves = Positive Energy, Perfect Your Intro, Use Deliberate Breathing, Don’t Rush – Take Your Time, Keep Movin’ On, and Use Body Language to Tour Advantage. The background in that infographic alternated between light green and bright blue and, but all the body text was white. Small white text on a light green background is nearly unreadable, as is shown above for just the very top of that infographic. Either that text should have been black (I changed the words speaking anxiety as an example), or the background should have been darker.

At Dave Paradi’s Think Outside The Slide web site there is a page with a Color Contrast Calculator for avoiding that graphical travesty of pretty but unreadable design.

At Entrepreneur on October 27, 2018 there was an article by Matthew McCreary titled 6 easy tips for conquering your fear of public speaking (infographic), which had another infographic version with a darker blue background, as is shown above.

A dozen awful sports quotations

Great quotations are wonderful, because there are oodles so bad they are funny. Yesterday at USA Today high school sports there was an article by Joe Leccesi titled NCSA: The worst inspirational quotes of all time. His twelve picks are:

“Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.” – Dennis Rodman

“Ninety percent of the game is half mental.” – Yogi Berra

"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.” – Joe Theismann

“I quit school in the sixth grade because of pneumonia. Not because I had it, but because I couldn’t spell it.” – Rocky Graziano

“Why should we have to go to class if we come here to play football, we ain’t come to play school, classes are pointless.” – Cardale Jones.

“I want to rush for 1,000 or 1,500 yards – whichever comes first.” – George Rogers

“We didn’t underestimate them. They were a lot better than we thought.” – Bobby Ronson

“We must have had 99 percent of the match. It was the other three percent that cost us.” – Ruud Gullit

“Defensively, I think it’s important for us to tackle.” – Karl Mecklenburg

“If lessons are learned in defeat, our team is getting a great education.” – Murray Warmath

“Lads, you’re not to miss practice unless your parents died or you died.” – Frank Leahy

“Look, I’m a coach. I’m not Harry Potter. He is magical, but in reality, there is no magic. Magic is fiction and football is real.” - Joe Mourinho

The facepalm gesture cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.

Should those be your last words?

As shown above, today’s Savage Chickens cartoon from Doug Savage is titled Death is Annoyed. He is so upset he gives that chicken until Thursday to come up with a better ending.

People best remember the first (primacy) and last (recency) things you say. At Wikipedia they both are in an article titled Serial-position effect. Fred E. Miller discussed both in his NO Sweat Public Speaking blog back on December 5, 2009 in a post titled The Law of Primacy and Recency.

A misleading bar chart with inflated fear percentages

At PresentationGuru on January 17, 2019 there was an article by Rosie Hoyland titled The best way to protect yourself from misleading graphs. It linked to a four-minute TED-Ed YouTube video by Lea Gaslowitz from July 6, 2017 titled How to spot a misleading graph, and also warned that: 

“Even careless handling of the data can send a distorted message.”

I found a good example of careless handling in a long, otherwise decent article by Michael Smith at SlideHeroes titled CONQUER THE FEAR! 8 Steps for Controlling Public Speaking Anxiety, which contains the bar chart shown above that displays results from the 2014 Chapman Survey of American Fears. The top blue bar indicates that 29% of Americans fear public speaking.

Compare that with my bar chart showing 25.3% (for the same sum of Very Afraid and Afraid) from a blog post on October 29, 2014 titled Chapman Survey on American Fears includes both zombies and ghosts, and the Washington Post version from an October 30, 2014 article titled America’s top fears: Public speaking, heights, and bugs.

How did Mr. Smith wind up with an answer that was inflated 4% higher than mine and the Washington Post? Look at the rather confusing data table from the survey for this item. As shown above, the first row in the data table is for Refused – people who didn’t answer because they don’t know. But he read and used 29.3% - the Cumulative Percent (right column) from the third row, which wrongly includes that 4.0 percent from the Refused (or Don’t Know) category. Really 8.8% were Very Afraid, and 16.5% were Afraid, which adds up to 25.3%. Oops! Every item in Mr. Smith’s chart includes that same mistake.

     

A Dilbert cartoon on January 30, 2019 described another type of misleading graph:

Presenter: As you can see from this chart, our product has been rated number one for six years in a row.

Dilbert: Why does you chart stop four years ago?

Presenter: I’ll bet you don’t get invited to a lot of parties.

Dilbert: That’s just a lucky guess.

The cartoon of a man with a pump was adapted from one at Openclipart.