On 3/16/16 2:58 PM, raghu wrote: > Some snippets to whet your appetite:
[snippets snipped] I was glancing casually at the NYT coverage of the Michigan results last night and I had to laugh: all those big blue bubbles for the various counties which somehow(*) denoted -- wait for it -- the size of Hillary's *lead* ! I.e. a county where ten people voted and seven of them voted for her would get a great big blue bubble, while a county where ten thousand people voted and Bernie won by 1% would get a weensy-tiny Bernie-colored bubble (I'm partly color blind so I couldn't really tell what Bernie's color was, but it was dingy and unattractive, while Hillary's cheerful blue really popped out.) The Times clearly has a good deal of ingenuity to exercise on oblique deceptions of this kind. (*) Inquiring minds want to know, but weren't told: what was the formula for deciding the sizes of the bubbles? Were they based on the ratio between B's and H's votes, or on the percentage-point gap? How were the sizes related to the underlying datum, whatever it was? I suspect that radius was driven by the datum, rather than area. Of course human perception of size is much more closely related to area than to linear dimensions, so you might say that the Times wasn't only lying, it was lying squared. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
