11 Most Useless And Misleading Infographics On The Internet

Everybody loves infographics . Facts ( and assertions ) just reverberate to life when you make them into cool movie . But this powerful tool is all too often misused . Here are 11 infographics that are either completely misleading or totally useless .

It ’s easy to create a chart that presents wrong data , cherry - picks right data , or just compares apples to orange . For a appeal of hilarious chart that contain false correlations ( the routine of people who drown in swim syndicate has a surprising coefficient of correlation with the telephone number of Nic Cage movies per year ) , check outTyler Vigen ’s Spurious Correlations(viaFastCo Design ) . But not all terrible chart are created that manner on aim . See for yourself …

1) Gun deaths turn everything upside down

ThisReuters chartabout the number of Florida gun dying since the Stand Your Ground jurisprudence run ends up connote the opposite of what the data shows . Because it is upside down . The XTC axis of rotation starts at 0 and then goes down to 800 , which makes it expect like the gun deaths were less than zero .

2) Cost Vs. Benefit of a College Education

This chart from aBusiness Insider articleabout the diminishing return key of a college education leave out a very cardinal fact : that the prospects of non - college graduates are even worse than those of graduates . It neglect the US Dept of Education numbers on the fact that non - college - graduates can require a significantly small amount of life-time wage than graduates .

3) Rape vs. Rapists

This one is really inauspicious — the Enliven Project created this infographic , which fit viral immediately . It aims to show the relatively little number of false rape accusations . Butas Slate ’s Amanda Marcotte explain , the chart damages its own cause , by get into “ one ravishment per rapist ” and constitute each Brassica napus as a single “ man ” symbol — when in fact , “ your average raper stacks up six victim . ” And the chart also probably overestimates the number of unreported rape .

4) Prison vs. Princeton

This super - viral chart was everywhere a few years ago , including Upworthy and the Atlantic . But as the Atlantic laterpointed out , it ’s factually incorrect — in fact , the telephone number for “ prison house ” and “ Princeton ” are reversed , and Ivy League tuition fee has n’t been that depressed in a long , retentive metre .

5) Nurses Rocketing up

As Masters of Mediapoints out , four control stick people stand in for 43,000 nurses — but then 28 peg people brook in for an additional 3,000 nurses . This makes a 7 percent increase see like a 7000 percent increase .

6) Hospital Infections

This shocking chart made the rounds of all the insurance - wonk blogs back in 2011 . It purports to show that one out of seven infirmary - aquired infection lead to death in the United States , versus one out of 122 in Europe . The only job , as Kevin Drum explicate :

I checked the point of reference at the bottom of the MBCC chart , and none of them seemed to back up their numbers . What ’s more , a few years agothe CDC approximate 99,000 deaths per year out of 1.7 million HAIs , a death rate rate of 5.8 % . For the EU , the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control estimates146,000 death per year out of 4.5 million HAIs(see p. 27 ) , a fatality rate charge per unit of 3.3 % .

That ’s a modest difference , and it obtain even more modest when you read more about these estimates , which are very , very rough and depend strongly on exactly how you count infections and how you assign deaths .

7) Climate Change Bill is Scary

This chart from John Boehnerpurports to show how Nancy Pelosi ’s clime variety legislation would in reality work , with a ton of shuddery boxes stacked on top of each other . See also Boehner’sintentionally confusing blob of acronyms in his health care reform chart .

8) The Eurozone Solar System Of Inflation

pomposity is the Dominicus . Germany is a planet . Zimbabwe is either a sunspot or the crew from Sunshine . [ viaForbes ]

9) “Global Cooling”

This chart purports to show that worldwide warming has stopped , by using cherrypicked data from 2007 to 2011 — leave out the colder 2006 . AsPeter Gleickpoints out , it rely on the fact that climate vacillate from year to class , instead of focusing on the full trend of the past several decade .

10) Where We Donate vs. Diseases That Kill Us

Thisis like one of those word matching tests from elementary schoolhouse where you had to pass lines from a word in one column to a Son in another .

Edited to add : Among other problems with this chart , the amount of money raised on the left is not the full amount arouse for each disease , but just the amount raise in one specific program , such as “ Jump Rope For Heart ” — thus give the chart not merely confusing , but misleading .

11) Changing Face of America

This infographic about slipstream and ethnicity in the United States from 1960 to 2060 is transformed , through bizarre visual image , into a map of the United States in which California , live in 1960 , is entirely whitened , and New York , over in 2060 , is entirely Latino . See alsothe most prescribed psychatric drugsover on Good .

germ includeGuardian , Infosthetics , The Atlantic

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