VizWorld.com

You trembled in front of the Afgan Counterinsurgency Strategy.. Then you cried for mercy from the US Government Acquisitions Process. Now, they’re back with the scariest one of all: The 193 step Pentagon IT Chart!

Believe it or not, the chart was actually drawn up to help the Pentagon’s cyber security team make some sense of the massive set of rules they’re expected to wade through, an attempt to “capture the tremendous breadth of applicable policies, some of which many [IT] practitioners may not even be aware, in a helpful organizational scheme.” Yes, looking at that graphical mushroom cloud of a chart, the word “helpful” certainly comes to mind. Bonus mind-boggling factoid: the chart was created by the DASD CIIA (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber, Identity & Information Assurance). Good general rule of thumb: never expect useful assistance from an entity with an acronym that long.

Saw has nothing on this.

Your Job Coud Be Worse: Pentagon IT Follows This Insane 193 Rule Chart.

Graphics bad, infographic, military

A few months ago we spilled the beans about the damage PowerPoint has caused in the Afghanistan operations abroad, but now the Pentagon has let loose the true dogs of war: The Government Acquisitions Process.

But that slide was child’s play compared to the three-foot wall chart the military uses to explain its gajillion-step process for developing, buying, and maintaining gear. The “Integrated Acquisitions Technology and Logistics Life Cycle Management” diagram is kind of a precis to the whole interminable progression, from “decompose concept functional definition into component concepts & assessment objective” to “execute support program that meets materiel readiness and operational support performance requirements and sustains system in most cost-effective manner.” Stare long enough, and you’ll start to see why it takes a decade for the Defense Department to buy a tanker plane, or why marines are still reading web pages with Internet Explorer 6.

Even printed 3 feet wide that would be tough to read. Having dealt with this process myself, however, I can attest to it shedding absolutely no light on the mysteries within.

I think this may be a 2-kitten slide.

via Revealed! Pentagon’s Craziest PowerPoint Slide EVER | Danger Room | Wired.com.

Graphics bad, flowchart, military

Wired, and others, has picked up on a chart in a recent Cisco report that shows various data uses from 1995 to 2010 as  a proportion of total traffic.  Then they notice the shrinking red area (Web usage), and proudly proclaim that the Web is Dying in the growth of “Apps” like on the iPhone.

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service.

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.

As soon as I saw the graph I thought it suspect.  Primarily because of the massive “51%” is Video area.  Sure, video uses a lot of data due to it’s continuous streaming nature, but most of that video is YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu, some decidedly Web-centric properties.  In addition, showing the chart as a proportion of total bandwidth is a bit of a misnomer, since bandwidth has grown exponentially since 1995.  BoingBoing thought so too, and took Cisco’s same report and adjusted the graph for the increase in bandwidth, and lo and behold:

The Web is Dead, my ass.  Maybe port-80 or HTML is on it’s way out, but you know what makes all those little “Apps” work?  XML from WebServers.

Update 8:08pm – Minor grammatical fixes.

Is the web really dead? – Boing Boing.

Graphics bad, visualization

As if the Oil Spill wasn’t bad enough, now BP has gone and shown us another level of ineptitude: Their complete lack of Photoshop skills.  A series of images has been released by various BP organizations purportedly showing just how hard they’re working on solving the Gulf Oil Crisis.  Sadly, the images are fabrications, and not very good ones.

The first one found was this image of the BP Command Center.

Several people have dissected this image (Gizmodo, Ameriblog) and have very detailed zooms showing how BP, for some unknown reason, decided to replace blank monitors with video footage.  In particular, the guy on the right seems to be staring at some kind of Sun chart?  In reality, he was staring at a screen with nothing but a white line on it, some of which you can still see on either side of his head.

Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

Click for the fullsize.  Once again, even moreso actually, you can easily see the blurred edges of the water and the oddly placed air traffic control tower in the upper left.  If you look very closely, you can even read the dash instruments which say they are hovering a mere 1 foot off the ground.  Gizmodo breaks it down quite well:

And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that the helicopter’s height is 1 foot, and that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. It speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can’t afford to treat it with anything but total candor.

If you find any more, let us know in the comments!

Graphics bad, bp, disaster, oil, photoshop

A couple of websites have picked up the news of an interesting little coffee table book called ‘The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts‘.  Those in the visualization & infographics communities have been shredding it as a perfect example of some of the worst infographics ever made.

Pitched as the combination of “startling graphic imagery with truly shocking facts gathered from the world’s most authoritative sources”, the book seems not to have convinced everyone. Reviewed instead as a “compendium of awful graphics”, its illustrations seem to ignore even the most basic rules of good infographic design, while the lack of any source material does not make the resulting insights trustworthy.

While I haven’t seen the book myself, the graphics floating around truly are bad.  The one above (click for fullsize) is simply ghastly.  From the unreadable text (I honestly thought it was some type of Pictograph at first), to the horrible moire pattern black and white pie chart, with 3 slices that I can’t tell any difference in, it really is an early contender for Worst Graphic of 2010.

via Question: Is This the Little Book of Shocking Infographics? – information aesthetics.

Graphics bad, book

BP is trying several different approaches to resolving the Gulf Oil Spill, and in a recent presentation by Senior VP Kent Wells, he showed the chart above to demonstrate how their efforts to collect the oil are improving every day.  Relying on the public’s perception of upward trendlines being “good”, Stephen Few wasn’t falling for it.  He took the raw data, and compiled his own graph showing not the Cumulative Oil Collected, but the Oil Collected Daily.

While the amount of collection increased in the beginning, it has decreased or held steady for the last four days and is now well below the average amount of daily collection for this period as a whole. Things are definitely not getting better. How do you spin bad news like this? One way is to create a misleading graph, but cover your ass by doing it in a way that isn’t an outright lie.

This may be the single best example of using visualization to tell the story you want, rather than the real story.

via Visual Business Intelligence – BP Oil Collection – Is the Effort Really Improving?.

Science bad, oil, visualization

An infographic from InfographicWorld contains a mind-boggling amount of information related to the Gulf Oil Spill.  Showing data as of yesterday (Thursday, May 13th), it starts with the basic “Location of Oil” graphs and “Predictions for the future” of the oil spill, but then continues to add in information on quotes from public officials and details on the response effort.

That alone would be fine, but then it goes way too far at adding information on the Top Hat, relief wells, environmental risks, a complete timeline, impacts on the fishing industry, companies involved, public opinion, offshore drilling and much much more.

This infographic really epitomizes information overload.  Still, if you want to know everything about the Gulf Oil Spill as of today, this has it all in a single collection of tiny-point font.  The fact that it’s a lossy JPEG doesn’t help either.

Fullsize after the break.

Visual Loop.

Read more…

Graphics bad, infographic, oil

Click for FullSize (not that it helps)

HotelChatter has a great report of the State of WiFi at various hotels, showing that contrary to their expectations, several hotels have begun the switch to free WiFi in the rooms as a way to increase customer happiness and loyalty. The report is great, but they’ve created this “chart” to go with it visualizing the results.

Several problems with this “chart”, and I use the term loosely:

• No idea what the various “width” of hotel sections means.  It seems to be simply sized to fit the studio name, not based on number of hotels or guests
• They use a “rainbow” colormap, which might be fine to divide up All Free vs Some Free vs Paid wifi, but they separate it into 5 sections with such slight color gradiations it can be hard to tell.
• The top part of the chart is completely pointless as far as I can tell.  It’s the exact same data as below (the same 5 bars), they just removed the individual chain names, and scattered them in some pseudo-circular arrangement.. For no apparent reason other than they could.

Definitely not designed by a graphics expert (at least, I really hope it wasn’t).  Maybe it was designed by a guest at a Holiday Inn Express?

What else do you see wrong with it?

via HotelChatter’s Annual Hotel WiFi Report 2010 || HotelChatter.

Graphics bad, infographic, wifi

I detest maps like this for one simple reason. They take something that is easy to understand, place it on a map, and then distort the map beyond reason. Where did Africa go? Where did China go?

Is the size of the country related to the debt to GDP ratio? No, the size of the country has no relationship to the color of the country. Is the size of the country related to external debt? The CIA, which they list as their source, has the external debt of the United States is $13.45 trillion, while the U.K. has an external debt of $9.08 trillion. Is the U.K. larger than the U.S? How can you tell?

Take a look at the United States. According to the map it has a 30% to 60% debt to GDP ratio. If you look at the U.S. National Debt Clock, our debt to GDP ratio is 89%. How did they get a ratio of less than 60% then? Simple. They ignored the asterisk. The CIA calculated a debt to GDP ratio of 52% for the United States, if you ignored the United States Treasury bonds held by Social Security, Federal Employees, Medicare and Medicaid.

Following the map of Europe’s external debt, here comes the same data put into global context. This map is a modified version of a work that has been made for the Times newspaper (featured in the printed edition on March, 25) in their coverage of the 2010 budget. As this picture shows, it is not only the Eurozone, but most Western countries in a deep crisis – global inequalities the other way around this time – this is a topic that will be with us for months (and years) to come and still a long way to go on the road to recovery. So, keep this picture in mind:

via Global recovery? The real dimension of external debt.

via : Global Debt Relative to GDP

Graphics bad, infographic

I hate it when my friends call me to fix the problems that Geek Squad created. I really hate it when stores offer bogus services like this. HD Guru tells the story like this:

HD Guru called three Best Buy stores. After confirming each employee received training on 3D TVs and installation services, we asked them to explain the process of “syncing” the 3D glasses. We received three different but oddly similar responses.

Blue shirt one said the glasses need to be synced with the Blu-ray player. The second geek referred to the 3D glasses needing to sync to the player via the USB port within the glasses, an impossible feat as there is no USB port on the glasses. The third stated the need to acquire the glasses’ IP address to sync with the Blu-ray player. There is no IP address for 3D glasses; they have no connectivity to the Internet or network. The Samsung battery powered glasses “sync” to the 3D content wirelessly via an infra-red pulse emitted by the TV.

We contacted Best Buy’s media relations department and asked why the company offers a fictional service. We are still awaiting a response.

via HDGURU.Com » Best Buy Offers Bogus 3D Sync Service.

Update: 3/23/2010: Best Buy has responded with what exactly this “3D Sync” service is:

We have some customers who aren’t quite sure how the 3D glasses work, or that the glasses automatically sync with their new 3D TVs. So we wanted to convey that they can depend on Geek Squad to answer their questions during installation and set-up. There is no additional charge for this – and the Geek Squad 3D installation and networking services are included in the total price of this offer.

So… Basically it’s a nothing service that exists merely to make the masses feel better when buying 3D TV’s and don’t know any better.

HDGuru – Best Buy Responds via The Consumerist

Hardware 3d, bad