I like that page too, because it gives little movies.
But give me a quiz afterwards about changes in sex
ratios and I have nothing to say.
The real question is which kinds of graph are _effective_
in conveying information, not what people like or find
attractive.
Your "work-around" is logically equivalent to -graph dot-.
It is not a "work-around"; it is a better graph, in my
view.
Nic
[email protected]
Gawrich Stefan
>
> > : Nick Cox [mailto:[email protected]]
>
> > It's not the answer you want, but I really don't understand
> > why these pyramids are so popular, or even why their key
> > limitation is not mentioned more frequently. It must be
> > some sort of social feedback loop, as with pie charts, that
> > within certain groups pyramids are familiar, therefore expected,
> > and vice versa.
> [...]
> > A pyramid obliges the reader mentally to pick up one bar
> and lay it down
> > on top of its neighbour. I don't believe that many of us are
> > very efficient at doing that in our heads.
>
>
> I agree that this is a real disadvantage of population
> pyramids. There is a
> workaround for this by mirroring the shape on the vertical axis with a
> stacked bar on the minor side showing the difference to the
> other side. But
> this is no perfect solution. Population Pyramids are better
> in showing big
> differences or time trends: My former students always loved this page:
> http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbpyr.html (Choose a
> interesting country,
> click "dynamic" and "Submit query").
>
> In my case the situation looks like a pop-pyramid but is not:
> The top left
> bar would probably show Prostate cancer for men, and the top right bar
> breast cancer for women as the most frequent sex-specific cancer
> localisations (I mixed up the sides in my first mail). The
> second bar from
> the top would show the second most frequent localisations for
> men and women
> and so on. So comparison of left and right bar is not the
> major point here.
>
> In my experience it's a quite useful basic graph for cancer
> data because
> many people are interested in cancer ranks. With this graph
> it's easy to see
> and to compare between the sexes. Plus one gets information
> on frequencies,
> too.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Stefan
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