Florence Nightingale´s 199th anniversary

bad graph of the day

A fairly meaningless graph in Le Monde about the comparative costs [per patient per year] of orphan and non-orphan diseases along the year. The evolution is impossible to capture and the ratio of the costs should be interpreted in terms of areas, when the cubic representation suggests volume…

graphics for the New York City marathon

As the first runners are starting the race in Staten Island, here are six graphics published in the NYT about the NYC marathon, pointed out to me by my friend Darren. The first one is a great moving histogram that I cannot reproduce here, following the four batches of runners. And the unbearably slow last runner! The second graph is an almost linear increase in the number of women running the race (which, by extrapolation, means that the NYC marathon will be an all-female race by 2068!). The third graph is a square version of a pie chart, which shows that the second largest contingent after the US runners is made of French runners (7%), way above Canadian runners (2.7%). The fifth graph shows spikes in the age repartition of the runners, at 30, 40, 50, and 60: since it is unlikely to be a reporting bias, unless id’s are not controlled when registering, which would be strange given the awards are distributed by five year block age groups, this may be due to people making a big case of changing decade by running the marathon or by runners who take advantage a new age group to aim for the podium. The latest explanation is very unlikely as it would only apply to elite runners and as it should also induce a spike at 35, 45, etc. (Incidentally, I checked the winner’s time in my category, 55-60, and last year a Frenchman won in 2:48:19, which means I would have to run at about the speed of my latest half-marathon to achieve this speed…) The last graph is also quite interesting as it follows the winning times for male and female runners against the current world record across years, showing that the route is not the most appropriate to break the record, in contrast with Berlin where several records got broken.

in the time of cholera