How Different Groups Spend Their Day -- NYT (7/31)
Another beautiful, intuitive design from the New York Times, with interesting ways to slice the data. My only complaint is that there are not quite enough ways to slice the data -- I'd like to see more variables, but more importantly, I'd like to be able to combine variables, e.g. employed white male with bachelor's. It would also be useful to be able to view charts side by side for easy comparison.
One interesting observation from playing with the data is that the higher the education level, the more time people spend eating. This is counterintuitive: I would expect that the more valuable people's time, the less time they spend eating. This relationship holds true for socializing and TV & movies and even sleeping, so why not with eating? Granted the differences are not large in magnitude (only about 5 minutes difference), but they are probably significant. I'm not sure how to explain this. The same counterintuitive relationship holds for sports.
If you will indulge me for one more mini-rant, why is it that infographics from popular news sources only focus on averages and completely ignore variability/dispersion? It's like they go half way to explaining the data and then stop because they think their audience is too dumb to understand the concept of variability (either that or they [the journalists] themselves are too dumb to communicate variability).
