I don't think about Nightingale that often, but every time she's mentioned I get taken aback by how incredibly revolutionary and important her work was and is.
Don't forget paleo-currents. This is how geologists can see what "direction" sediment was being deposited, they use it to get some sort of probability vector
I took a college course on data visualization and we did go over these diagrams, but we just called them polar diagrams since we were plotting with polar coordinates. Its nice to know they have a proper name.
"Polar diagram" *is* the proper name for a class of diagrams. But for something like the directional sensitivity of a microphone there's only one circuit of the diagram: the sensitivity at pi radians is the same as at 3 pi radians. I think the point about Nightingale diagrams is that they *don't* necessarily repeat each time around.
In the original nightingale example, the diagram is contrived. The point would have been made just as well with a much easier to read xy-graph. It would have an upward line then a downward line after the introduction of nightingale's cleanliness stuff.
Absolutely. This is in contrast to Merrifield’s diagram, which is much more effective. It actually uses the cyclic nature of the year and the continuity of time in its presentation.
@@jonathanwalther I didn't expect anything, which is why I was pleasantly surprised. I live in America. Such graceful honesty is not very common these days over here in the States.
People post these kinds of plots all the time on /r/dataisbeautiful, and they are almost always terrible. It's because people don't understand that the angle is supposed to be a cicular variable, and they will just plot arbitrary bar plots on a circle because it 'looks pretty'.
In fact I think his example using months wasn't really the best example of where this diagram is really useful, because they can be represented quite okay on a line too. (I don't quite understand why he says to go to january you have to go back to the start? You could just prolong the x axis so you see january 2021 comes after december 2020...) The microphone or wind examples are much much more sensible
I tend to think polar area plots are bad anyway, because it is not easy to visually compare the areas of sectors of different radii. If you can't easily interpret the data with your eyes, the visualization is useless. Bar graphs and line graphs, on the other hand, are very easy to evaluate at a glance.
@@renyhp I think it depends on what you're trying to show. This specific case works well, because it very neatly shows that previois years overlap and that last year was a big outlier - it also means you could include many more years on the diagram without squishing it down, which might lessen the impact of it. In general though I agree, if you're just going across a few years then an extended bar (or line) graph works fine.
@@renyhp When presenting data of a cyclical, periodic nature, the discontinuity between the end of one cycle and the beginning of another can hide useful trends, so that even if multiple years worth of bar graphs were laid atop one another, some nuance would be lost at the beginning and end. The graph clearly has limited use cases when addressing the public (for all of the reasons listed in this thread), but when poring over one's own data, this is a passable alternative to shifting the start and end of the cycle (so long as you remember not to hit any of the pitfalls in data visualization to which this is susceptible).
I'm surprised - there is a famous book - "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte. It is available on Amazon. This is perfect for Numberphile.
You could plot the bottom and upper boundaries within 1 or 2 standard variations, make some sort of a ring around the year and color it. That way you could draw line with a contrasting color for recent data and it wouldn't be lost in the graph.
The overlapping data would in fact mean that numbers are stable in a period of time. The key is to be able to visualize the non-overlapping data in a continous manner. I love it.
I feel like this diagram would suit any stellar object with varying luminosity, especially when you expect a regular change in luminosity, like planets obscuring their parent star.
Maybe because circles were always very popular in Japanese mathematics as you can see in many so-called Sangaku problems. Also they have a circle on their flag. But I am just doing free association.
Wonderful woman, smart and charitable. If Galton was the father of statistics, it'd be no exaggeration to say she's the mother of statistics. I also agree we need more variation in graphs in media. The whole point is to convey information in a clean and clear format and sticking to the 3 graphs we see almost everywhere can often queer the data, even if the statistical methods used to get that data is sound and ethical.
This is so cool, because I'm working on my master thesis on Finnish history, more particularly I'm studying the death rates in Finnish archipelago during the Crimean War (which had some battles in Baltic Sea as well).
One advantage I see over a linear graph over several years is that you can see normal variations (such as the drop in reporting over holidays). That is harder to see over several years in a linear diagram.
Yeah, the 'overlay' effect is the main advantage (when used for time) I think. For like angles or other truly cyclical things it has more advantages, but time is a combination of linear and cyclic. And even though you could still plot multiple cycles overlaid on a linear plot, it wouldn't be quite as clear.
I've seen these used a lot with 6 values (as opposed to 12 months) in RPG games and a couple other asian media forms, so I'm guessing that's where the "honeycomb" name comes in. Although those tend to be closer to the original version rather than the area-scaled one. First example i can think of is JoJo stand graphs, and there's a wikipedia page on something very similar called Radar Chart.
Those radar graphs are different from Nightingale diagrams, as the different spokes represent totally independent measures; Nightingale diagrams are about change over a cyclic period of time.
This is really great! I was looking for videos on the Nightingale diagrams for a project and there really wasn't many on the internet. It's like you have read my mind!
A version of this sort of diagram is used in geology a lot to indicate variation of parameters with direction around the compass. They are often called rose diagrams.
I'm starting to write my thesis on biomolecular rotary motors and these seems like a beautiful way to visualize some of my data. I'll definitely have to rewatch this later.
I would say they aren't used that often because it's harder to represent something clearly in this format, so it takes more thought to make data that is clear (her second chart is more clear than her first, for example) while linear graphs are easier to create something that's immediately recognizable
I agree. I don't think the ease of matching the end-to-end bits of data cycles makes up for the difficulty and the mess added to everything else when using the Nightingale Diagram. Also, the downtime of the registration office kind of kills the relevance of the data around that time period so it really doesn't matter if the series is interrupted by the cycle on the linear graph. If the December-January time period were important, you can simply shift the months so that the graph is split at the least important time period. Or better yet, duplicate the January data on the end so it goes [January, February,...December, January] and you get the exact same effect but without the difficulties of a polar diagram. It's not as concise, no, but sacrificing ergonomics for aesthetics on something that is meant to be useful is kind of silly.
Friend of the show Tim Harford did a podcast recently talking about how this diagram was great politically, but very misleading from a data visualisation point of view.
@@archivist17 Just look at the diagram. The number of deaths starts going down in the last few months of the first circle, months before Nightingale intervened on the battlefield hospital. It's obvious when you look for it, but the diagram is constructed to hide it.
I'm in ICT and an audiophile and I fully agree that their use is widespread in microphone directionality and antenna sensitivity - and for good reason.
@@FiltyIncognito unless you want to show/compare productivity for the same month/season over several years. Though, yeah...seemed more artistic than anything else.
We use these in business fairly regularly, not when you’re looking at something cyclical but when you’re looking at something with a large number of attributes and you want to show the magnitude of those attributes.
Two similar plots that come to mind: 1) Temperature records -- lots of historical equipment that used clockwork to rotate a chart with a pen that recorded temperature. 2) Watchman's clocks, another clockwork device that rotated a paper disk which recorded the watchman's visits to key sites where a watch key would be inserted and make an impression on the paper.
@@fowlerj111 I always like to say: "In place X education is so poor that at the end of primary school 60% of the pupils cannot read & write properly and twice as many are bad at arithmetic." Most people don't seem to notice this is nonsense... 😆
This was brilliant. As a public health graduate, I immediately grasped the usefulness of this presentation. It is the shape of the cycle in which you can see variations from previous years.
Part of the reason that these types of visualizations aren't used by statistics offices, especially in the UK, is that public sector websites have to be accessible to all people, and graphs like that aren't accessible to all, plus it's too cluttered to get the message out. Also there is research out there that shows people having trouble interpreting graphs like that (and anything circular) or where angles need to be compared, whereas it's easier to compare lengths.
The coxcomb (or cockscomb) is the fleshy bit on the head of a male chicken, from which the style of hat gets its name. I guess these plots can look a bit like those, too.
The one thing he didn't seem to mention is that any time there is a dip, assuming that the rate is fairly constant, there is bound to be a spike after a dip. Like he said, the offices are closed.
Radiation patterns of antennas also use this sort of polar representations because they directly show how received or transmitted power changes with the actual direction shown in the plot, just like the wind example.
You should do another video with examples of space related things for this since you are an astronomer. Or a general one where you should both the xy and Nightingale versions. One problem with these is actually that radial value isn't the same as y-value. A higher radial value - like a greater mortality - that is going down can be more easily seen on an xy. The red line in Jan. was going down in y and in radius but if it was in Aug. then up in y could be both up and down in radius. It could be harder to see but that could be because people are less used to it or it could be some psychological thing.
The problem with this diagram is the average person can't compare month-to-month because the heights are not lined up. Additionally, Florence Nightingale is correct: it looks like the area is important when that is not the correct idea to communicate. On the other hand, the fact that December is not connected to January, quite frankly, doesn't matter.
For antenna and microphone gain these are known as azimuth patterns (there's even a function to plot them in MATLAB called patternAzimuth). The simple spoke-and-wheel versions are also called radar plots.
Ive seen/used these plots used when plotting angles of bonds in molecular dynamics simulations. They help visualize the energy in dihedral bond angles really well.
I just saw her diagrams for the first time in a Johnny Ball book. Now a few days later here it is again. Like when you learn a new word then you hear it all over the place.
Oh wow, Professor Merrifield looks and sounds so different at home I didn't even realise it was the same astronomy guy until the clips at the end for comparison!
Friendly neighbourhood statistician here. We use radial diagrams all the time, but almost never decide what goes into a news article. The real problem is making it appropriate for the user, and if a particular chart would be difficult for the average man or woman in the street then we won't include it. For a more technical audience? They get used all the time :) again as Florence realised the problem is that people will tend to naturally judge the area and not the radial distance, so even with radial lines a person will tend to estimate incorrectly the relative effects on a chart such as this.
This graph type is very nice for comparing one year to another, or one cycle to another, but because the "X-axis" isn't a straight line, it's not quite as simple to compare month-to-month or datapoint-to-datapoint that have small changes.
I think the main problem with these is that it's much harder to compare two values that aren't directly next to each other. For example at 3:37 on the right diagram. Which month has the higher death rate? December or March? You can probably eyeball it and get to the correct answer, but it's less accurate than a simple plot. Radial circles like in the first diagram help, but don't solve the problem entirely.
I think the "area interpretation error" is a real downside of plotting this only as distance from the center. Usually when we are presented with a rate we intuitively know we can integrate below the curve to get a grasp of the total amount in a period. Even though I know it is not accurate, I can't help but integrated that big bump in April 2020 to get an idea of how many more people died. Maybe scale it to r^2 and not the radius?
I wouldn't be surprised, I've been impressed by how youtube's auto captions have improved over the past two years. Not surprising that translation hasn't kept up
a kind of similar thing gets used in engineering. an engine PV indicator diagram... originally a drum that rotated in proportion to a piston's stroke. so it oscillated between two angles stroke length, volume ... and a ink nib that recorded cylinder pressure. a planometer used and path traced out... Integral read off. then multiplication by suitable factors to figure out actual mechanical work done..
These could be useful for pulsar intensity plots. I remember being in a colloquium as an undergrad where an astronomer presented the data, centered on one peak, which means the second peak was split in two at either end of the plot (the domain was only 1 period). One professor, who was known for being a pain, derailed the talk for a good 5-10 minutes complaining the astronomer was intentionally (no, really) trying to make us think he had enough data for 3 peaks instead of just two. However, I'm sure he would have had a different problem with Nightingale plots, but they'd at least not have the discontinuity.
Nightingale was also being a bit sneaky with here diagrams. The way she plotted the data hides the fact that the deaths by disease starting plumetting before they introduced the sanitary measures. You can clearly see that if you plot the data as a conventional bar diagram. Of course hygiene is still very important and she helped raise awareness about that fact, so I guess the end justifies the means.
It’d be interesting to see how far back you could go with the baseline data to try and determine how statistically significant the beginning of this year is. You’ve got to be careful judging outcomes from a single outlier
Yes, then you never have to do a carriage return when you reach the end of the line. XD (still I like the straight lines better. I'm curious as to what was the conclusion of the readability)
To show which folders and their subfolders on a computer drive use which amount of space, these graphs are also used by some computer tools. In these tools, you can select how many levels of subfolders you show.
I'm suspecting that are different kinds of graphs, where radial distance and area don't show any value. Angles show size -> not all folders have the same size, sop the 'pie wedges are different sizes. And every outer ring is a sub-folder layer deeper, not showing extra data, but just more specific where the data is located. Like this: a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/hdgraph/screenshots/93185.jpg/max/max/1
Mortality statistics can be adjusted to date of death rather than date reported. There are plenty of data scientists doing this from the ONS data. That eliminates the holiday dips.
Hmm I guess I reinvented this graph type, when I was doing a paper on bodybuilding. It all started with how best to space out the workouts on a bi-weekly arrangement, and designing it on a straight line was very annoying, given its cyclic nature. So once I started using a circle, things fell into place very nicely and easily. It was very useful in the design stage, rather then using it in the gem.
At about 3:54, with regards to the after effects of conflict. I suspect Nightingale's research must have contributed to the 1899 Hague Declaration (concerning expanding bullets)
There is an asteroid named after her: (3122) Florence. It's one of the biggest potentially hazardous near-Earth objects and it has two small moons. Flew close by Earth in 2017...
honestly.. I just YESTERDAY came across a Nightingale diagram for the first time ever. What are the odds :P maybe a video idea for Matt... How many viewers will have come across a video's subject matter in a timespan that makes it seem strangely coincidental? Though, obviously Numberphile's viewers are rather likely to be interested in the same subjects they also watch videos of.
I wonder if "coxcomb" became "honeycomb" because people are more familiar with honeycombs and because they don't sound rude? I'd also assume that Florence Nightingale was thinking about the rooster's comb, rather than the jester's hat: the diagram does look a lot like that.
That's great. I guess I should do that for Germany and show it to the people claiming that "it's just another flu": showing that we have a lot of excess mortality *despite* our measures.
The thing missing from these kinds of studies is age demographics; there is a pretty clear trend of the disease killing 55+ individuals and having ignored that fact, in the US at least, we have not properly addressed the issue and worse, taken measures that have done horrible economic damage without reason.
On Brady´s question about why these diagrams are uncommon, I think it may be due to stackability, sqares are stackable and circles are not. And newspapers became a race for using space in the most efficient manner.
Honeycomb-diagram sounds very similar to the dutch "Hanekam-diagram". Hanekam is the literal translation of cockscomb (so that fleshy thing on the head of a rooster).
feels kind of akin to n-sided polygon/newtons method for calculating pi, ie the precise value is orbited , it's often easier to track a object by circling "aim" around it, than trying to sight it directly. used practically for conical scanning. also many optimisation by hillclimbing algorithms.
Helpful for cycling analysis, but not really a cleaner way to look at it, especially, since data entry is a step function for December- January every year.
I think what you're saying, and what is lost in the video, is that COVID deaths are affected by the season (as does flu and other respiratory diseases) and this plot would make that clear and also remain readable as to the differences between the years. Deaths of soldiers in war is also usually seasonally-related (depending on the climate of the warzone.)
More videos with Mike: bit.ly/Merrifield_Playlist
Sixty Symbols: th-cam.com/users/sixtysymbols
Deep Sky Videos: th-cam.com/users/deepskyvideos
Sorry for the Timtrusion but is there any word on Hello Internet.
Great video btw. :)
I don't think about Nightingale that often, but every time she's mentioned I get taken aback by how incredibly revolutionary and important her work was and is.
Like a real life mother theresa
@@titaniumtomato7247 As opposed to fictional mother Theresa?
@@samuelterry6354 As opposed to the fictional depiction of Mother Theresa who actually was an orrible person.
@@titaniumtomato7247 real mother Theresa was a terrible person
??.
I’ve long used these plots - they’re available in Microsoft Excel where they’re called radar charts.
That will actually come in handy for me - much appreciated!
Came to see if someone had pointed this out. It has been useful for me at work when dealing with things in polar coordinates.
I love how the question of Why did you do this breaks down to "I'm a scientist and I'm bored"
Global temperature variation are often shown like this, I’ve also seen Arctic sea ice area plotted this way
Don't forget paleo-currents. This is how geologists can see what "direction" sediment was being deposited, they use it to get some sort of probability vector
I took a college course on data visualization and we did go over these diagrams, but we just called them polar diagrams since we were plotting with polar coordinates. Its nice to know they have a proper name.
"Polar diagram" *is* the proper name for a class of diagrams. But for something like the directional sensitivity of a microphone there's only one circuit of the diagram: the sensitivity at pi radians is the same as at 3 pi radians. I think the point about Nightingale diagrams is that they *don't* necessarily repeat each time around.
I thought they're called RADIO diagrams.
@@zstanojevic9574 Radial
??.
In the original nightingale example, the diagram is contrived. The point would have been made just as well with a much easier to read xy-graph. It would have an upward line then a downward line after the introduction of nightingale's cleanliness stuff.
Absolutely. This is in contrast to Merrifield’s diagram, which is much more effective. It actually uses the cyclic nature of the year and the continuity of time in its presentation.
I agree neo. the only use of this graph is to show seasonal variances that repeat yearly
9:04 "Because I'm a scientist, and I'm nosey" Boy, that brutal honesty caught me off guard! LOL! 😆
This was such a beautiful and powerful response to Brady's question!
What else did you expect? Why do you find it brutally honest? For me, it was the mostly expected and natural answer.
@@jonathanwalther I didn't expect anything, which is why I was pleasantly surprised. I live in America. Such graceful honesty is not very common these days over here in the States.
@@LincolnBerryIII Thx, greetings from Germany.
i thought he'd say "just for fun" lol
I like that its Mike Merrifield from Sixty Symbols on Numberphile, it's like a superhero crossover movie
People post these kinds of plots all the time on /r/dataisbeautiful, and they are almost always terrible. It's because people don't understand that the angle is supposed to be a cicular variable, and they will just plot arbitrary bar plots on a circle because it 'looks pretty'.
In fact I think his example using months wasn't really the best example of where this diagram is really useful, because they can be represented quite okay on a line too. (I don't quite understand why he says to go to january you have to go back to the start? You could just prolong the x axis so you see january 2021 comes after december 2020...) The microphone or wind examples are much much more sensible
I tend to think polar area plots are bad anyway, because it is not easy to visually compare the areas of sectors of different radii. If you can't easily interpret the data with your eyes, the visualization is useless. Bar graphs and line graphs, on the other hand, are very easy to evaluate at a glance.
@@renyhp I think it depends on what you're trying to show. This specific case works well, because it very neatly shows that previois years overlap and that last year was a big outlier - it also means you could include many more years on the diagram without squishing it down, which might lessen the impact of it.
In general though I agree, if you're just going across a few years then an extended bar (or line) graph works fine.
@SofaKingCool 90% of everything is garbage, if you focus on the negative elements you won't ever find the items worth your attention
@@renyhp When presenting data of a cyclical, periodic nature, the discontinuity between the end of one cycle and the beginning of another can hide useful trends, so that even if multiple years worth of bar graphs were laid atop one another, some nuance would be lost at the beginning and end. The graph clearly has limited use cases when addressing the public (for all of the reasons listed in this thread), but when poring over one's own data, this is a passable alternative to shifting the start and end of the cycle (so long as you remember not to hit any of the pitfalls in data visualization to which this is susceptible).
I'm surprised - there is a famous book - "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte. It is available on Amazon. This is perfect for Numberphile.
You could plot the bottom and upper boundaries within 1 or 2 standard variations, make some sort of a ring around the year and color it. That way you could draw line with a contrasting color for recent data and it wouldn't be lost in the graph.
The overlapping data would in fact mean that numbers are stable in a period of time. The key is to be able to visualize the non-overlapping data in a continous manner. I love it.
Either the non-overlapping or else the (in case it's yearly) seasonally dependent, or in the case of those microphones, the directional dependence.
I feel like this diagram would suit any stellar object with varying luminosity, especially when you expect a regular change in luminosity, like planets obscuring their parent star.
Hey Numberphile, I'd like to see a Nightingale diagram of your subs over the last 10 years.
I second that
Third!
Me too
I think that would have been a great extra at numberphile 2
Now I think TH-cam should add a feature in the about channel to view a Nightingale diagram of viewers and subscribers.Great Suggestion!
I've noticed that Nightingale diagrams and their variants are much more common in Japan. I wonder if there is any particular reason for that.
Maybe because circles were always very popular in Japanese mathematics as you can see in many so-called Sangaku problems. Also they have a circle on their flag. But I am just doing free association.
Wonderful woman, smart and charitable. If Galton was the father of statistics, it'd be no exaggeration to say she's the mother of statistics.
I also agree we need more variation in graphs in media. The whole point is to convey information in a clean and clear format and sticking to the 3 graphs we see almost everywhere can often queer the data, even if the statistical methods used to get that data is sound and ethical.
So you're saying...there were more to those glances between Florence and Francis than innocent flirtation? Scandalous!
alright, whats that?
😂
This is so cool, because I'm working on my master thesis on Finnish history, more particularly I'm studying the death rates in Finnish archipelago during the Crimean War (which had some battles in Baltic Sea as well).
One advantage I see over a linear graph over several years is that you can see normal variations (such as the drop in reporting over holidays). That is harder to see over several years in a linear diagram.
Yeah, the 'overlay' effect is the main advantage (when used for time) I think. For like angles or other truly cyclical things it has more advantages, but time is a combination of linear and cyclic. And even though you could still plot multiple cycles overlaid on a linear plot, it wouldn't be quite as clear.
Fun fact: a cocks comb is in dutch called hanenkam, which sounds suspiciously similar like honeycomb. Some lost-in-translation coincidence perhaps?
Thanks, recently heard the 99pi episode but forget to look the diagrams up.
I only just listened to the _Cautionary Tales_ episode about these! 😄
Same so now I am quite dubious of them.
Of course Tim Harford (of Cautionary Tales) was on the Numberphile podcast in September. This was an interesting overlap.
@@tguy0720 but their main criticism was actually fixed in this video.
I've seen these used a lot with 6 values (as opposed to 12 months) in RPG games and a couple other asian media forms, so I'm guessing that's where the "honeycomb" name comes in. Although those tend to be closer to the original version rather than the area-scaled one. First example i can think of is JoJo stand graphs, and there's a wikipedia page on something very similar called Radar Chart.
Also, in those RPG diagrams, there isn't usually a cyclic nature to the spokes. They aren't related at all, the way, say, the months of a year are.
Not all polar diagrams are nightingale diagrams.
Those radar graphs are different from Nightingale diagrams, as the different spokes represent totally independent measures; Nightingale diagrams are about change over a cyclic period of time.
This is really great! I was looking for videos on the Nightingale diagrams for a project and there really wasn't many on the internet. It's like you have read my mind!
A version of this sort of diagram is used in geology a lot to indicate variation of parameters with direction around the compass. They are often called rose diagrams.
I'm starting to write my thesis on biomolecular rotary motors and these seems like a beautiful way to visualize some of my data. I'll definitely have to rewatch this later.
The child painting in the background makes the whole video so much better. :)
I would say they aren't used that often because it's harder to represent something clearly in this format, so it takes more thought to make data that is clear (her second chart is more clear than her first, for example) while linear graphs are easier to create something that's immediately recognizable
I agree. I don't think the ease of matching the end-to-end bits of data cycles makes up for the difficulty and the mess added to everything else when using the Nightingale Diagram.
Also, the downtime of the registration office kind of kills the relevance of the data around that time period so it really doesn't matter if the series is interrupted by the cycle on the linear graph.
If the December-January time period were important, you can simply shift the months so that the graph is split at the least important time period.
Or better yet, duplicate the January data on the end so it goes [January, February,...December, January] and you get the exact same effect but without the difficulties of a polar diagram. It's not as concise, no, but sacrificing ergonomics for aesthetics on something that is meant to be useful is kind of silly.
I really like the drawings on the board behind the professor haha
He drew them all by himself. 😊
@@U014B 😊 omg all by himself. he has really ascended out of his mortal shell and attained big boy status.
Friend of the show Tim Harford did a podcast recently talking about how this diagram was great politically, but very misleading from a data visualisation point of view.
And what was his evidence?
@@archivist17 Just look at the diagram. The number of deaths starts going down in the last few months of the first circle, months before Nightingale intervened on the battlefield hospital. It's obvious when you look for it, but the diagram is constructed to hide it.
Mike is my favorite professor of em all
I'm in ICT and an audiophile and I fully agree that their use is widespread in microphone directionality and antenna sensitivity - and for good reason.
I've seen them used as weird progress charts for projects as a kind of snailshell....that increases to an external boundary of 100% complete
seems like a rather odd choice since the rate of completion would be more relevant and much better illustrated with a standard graph
@@FiltyIncognito unless you want to show/compare productivity for the same month/season over several years. Though, yeah...seemed more artistic than anything else.
We use these in business fairly regularly, not when you’re looking at something cyclical but when you’re looking at something with a large number of attributes and you want to show the magnitude of those attributes.
Two similar plots that come to mind:
1) Temperature records -- lots of historical equipment that used clockwork to rotate a chart with a pen that recorded temperature.
2) Watchman's clocks, another clockwork device that rotated a paper disk which recorded the watchman's visits to key sites where a watch key would be inserted and make an impression on the paper.
"if the death rate had continued at that rate, the entire army would have been killed", she was a hero
It depends on which side you are on.
And if it had continued even longer, 150% of the army would have been killed! 🙄😉
@@fowlerj111 the army would've outsourced its deaths
@@fowlerj111 I always like to say:
"In place X education is so poor that at the end of primary school 60% of the pupils cannot read & write properly and twice as many are bad at arithmetic." Most people don't seem to notice this is nonsense... 😆
@@FLScrabbler make the 60% into anything less than 33.33...% and it can.
I’ve never seen professor Merryfield on numberphile! Love this guy.
This was brilliant. As a public health graduate, I immediately grasped the usefulness of this presentation. It is the shape of the cycle in which you can see variations from previous years.
Part of the reason that these types of visualizations aren't used by statistics offices, especially in the UK, is that public sector websites have to be accessible to all people, and graphs like that aren't accessible to all, plus it's too cluttered to get the message out. Also there is research out there that shows people having trouble interpreting graphs like that (and anything circular) or where angles need to be compared, whereas it's easier to compare lengths.
It's nice to feel special once in a while.
The coxcomb (or cockscomb) is the fleshy bit on the head of a male chicken, from which the style of hat gets its name. I guess these plots can look a bit like those, too.
It's also what we in Norway call the mohawk hairstyle. Particularly if it has some height, and preferably spikes, to it.
they showed that in the video too
Very interesting, informative and worthwhile video. A must see for everyone, especially those in the health sciences and statistical sciences.
that's an incredibly useful way of visualizing certain types of data sets, and I've barely ever seen it used! Very interesting, thank you!
The one thing he didn't seem to mention is that any time there is a dip, assuming that the rate is fairly constant, there is bound to be a spike after a dip. Like he said, the offices are closed.
Radiation patterns of antennas also use this sort of polar representations because they directly show how received or transmitted power changes with the actual direction shown in the plot, just like the wind example.
You should do another video with examples of space related things for this since you are an astronomer.
Or a general one where you should both the xy and Nightingale versions.
One problem with these is actually that radial value isn't the same as y-value.
A higher radial value - like a greater mortality - that is going down can be more easily seen on an xy.
The red line in Jan. was going down in y and in radius but if it was in Aug. then up in y could be both up and down in radius.
It could be harder to see but that could be because people are less used to it or it could be some psychological thing.
In geology we use those diagrams to show the direction of multiple faults in a big system as well as favored orientation of minerals sometimes
The problem with this diagram is the average person can't compare month-to-month because the heights are not lined up. Additionally, Florence Nightingale is correct: it looks like the area is important when that is not the correct idea to communicate. On the other hand, the fact that December is not connected to January, quite frankly, doesn't matter.
For antenna and microphone gain these are known as azimuth patterns (there's even a function to plot them in MATLAB called patternAzimuth). The simple spoke-and-wheel versions are also called radar plots.
Ive seen/used these plots used when plotting angles of bonds in molecular dynamics simulations. They help visualize the energy in dihedral bond angles really well.
I just saw her diagrams for the first time in a Johnny Ball book. Now a few days later here it is again. Like when you learn a new word then you hear it all over the place.
These seem super useful for looking at data trends. I love data visualization.
Oh wow, Professor Merrifield looks and sounds so different at home I didn't even realise it was the same astronomy guy until the clips at the end for comparison!
Friendly neighbourhood statistician here. We use radial diagrams all the time, but almost never decide what goes into a news article. The real problem is making it appropriate for the user, and if a particular chart would be difficult for the average man or woman in the street then we won't include it. For a more technical audience? They get used all the time :) again as Florence realised the problem is that people will tend to naturally judge the area and not the radial distance, so even with radial lines a person will tend to estimate incorrectly the relative effects on a chart such as this.
This graph type is very nice for comparing one year to another, or one cycle to another, but because the "X-axis" isn't a straight line, it's not quite as simple to compare month-to-month or datapoint-to-datapoint that have small changes.
I think the main problem with these is that it's much harder to compare two values that aren't directly next to each other. For example at 3:37 on the right diagram. Which month has the higher death rate? December or March? You can probably eyeball it and get to the correct answer, but it's less accurate than a simple plot. Radial circles like in the first diagram help, but don't solve the problem entirely.
I love Nightingale diagrams! :) I have used it for the power consumption graph of a cube-sat orbiting a asteroid every 12 hours in the past.
Polar curves. Very useful in the lighting industry. Useful for any data that is circular or cyclical.
I think the "area interpretation error" is a real downside of plotting this only as distance from the center. Usually when we are presented with a rate we intuitively know we can integrate below the curve to get a grasp of the total amount in a period. Even though I know it is not accurate, I can't help but integrated that big bump in April 2020 to get an idea of how many more people died. Maybe scale it to r^2 and not the radius?
I am surprised on how accurate the auto-translator is, actually. Has there been any upgrade about that ?
The power of machine learning.
I wouldn't be surprised, I've been impressed by how youtube's auto captions have improved over the past two years. Not surprising that translation hasn't kept up
with all the audio data they have of us it’s only a matter of time before it’s perfected
It's constantly learning.
a kind of similar thing gets used in engineering. an engine PV indicator diagram...
originally a drum that rotated in proportion to a piston's stroke. so it oscillated between two angles stroke length, volume ... and a ink nib that recorded cylinder pressure.
a planometer used and path traced out... Integral read off. then multiplication by suitable factors to figure out actual mechanical work done..
These could be useful for pulsar intensity plots. I remember being in a colloquium as an undergrad where an astronomer presented the data, centered on one peak, which means the second peak was split in two at either end of the plot (the domain was only 1 period). One professor, who was known for being a pain, derailed the talk for a good 5-10 minutes complaining the astronomer was intentionally (no, really) trying to make us think he had enough data for 3 peaks instead of just two. However, I'm sure he would have had a different problem with Nightingale plots, but they'd at least not have the discontinuity.
Nightingale was also being a bit sneaky with here diagrams. The way she plotted the data hides the fact that the deaths by disease starting plumetting before they introduced the sanitary measures. You can clearly see that if you plot the data as a conventional bar diagram. Of course hygiene is still very important and she helped raise awareness about that fact, so I guess the end justifies the means.
MOAR Merrifield!!!
Rose diagrams, as we call them, are used often in structural geology to plot the directions of faults and fractures.
That whiteboard in the background is 10/10!
Your intro is top notch
this guy will be remembered for his Milenium Falcon diagrams
It’d be interesting to see how far back you could go with the baseline data to try and determine how statistically significant the beginning of this year is. You’ve got to be careful judging outcomes from a single outlier
I can imagine a lot of great uses for these interesting graphs.
I just published an article about the readability of rotated words, and presented my data very similarly :)
Yes, then you never have to do a carriage return when you reach the end of the line. XD
(still I like the straight lines better. I'm curious as to what was the conclusion of the readability)
Hay, back to sixty symbols now. Quarantine is no joke
Shhh... don't tell on me!
It can easily be used in astronomy to show variations in brightness of an object over the years
To show which folders and their subfolders on a computer drive use which amount of space, these graphs are also used by some computer tools. In these tools, you can select how many levels of subfolders you show.
I'm suspecting that are different kinds of graphs, where radial distance and area don't show any value.
Angles show size -> not all folders have the same size, sop the 'pie wedges are different sizes.
And every outer ring is a sub-folder layer deeper, not showing extra data, but just more specific where the data is located.
Like this: a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/hdgraph/screenshots/93185.jpg/max/max/1
These are also known as polar or radar diagrams.
Mortality statistics can be adjusted to date of death rather than date reported. There are plenty of data scientists doing this from the ONS data. That eliminates the holiday dips.
Hmm I guess I reinvented this graph type, when I was doing a paper on bodybuilding. It all started with how best to space out the workouts on a bi-weekly arrangement, and designing it on a straight line was very annoying, given its cyclic nature. So once I started using a circle, things fell into place very nicely and easily. It was very useful in the design stage, rather then using it in the gem.
Nicely done.
3:17 I have a copy of that DIY book on the shelf- it's >30 years old.
At about 3:54, with regards to the after effects of conflict. I suspect Nightingale's research must have contributed to the 1899 Hague Declaration (concerning expanding bullets)
These are very common in power distribution graphs of receiver/transmitter antennae within the area of electronic engineering
There is an asteroid named after her: (3122) Florence. It's one of the biggest potentially hazardous near-Earth objects and it has two small moons. Flew close by Earth in 2017...
honestly.. I just YESTERDAY came across a Nightingale diagram for the first time ever. What are the odds :P
maybe a video idea for Matt... How many viewers will have come across a video's subject matter in a timespan that makes it seem strangely coincidental?
Though, obviously Numberphile's viewers are rather likely to be interested in the same subjects they also watch videos of.
I've always called them "radial"
Excel calls them 'radar'
Fascinating! Thank you!
you have one of the most intensive channels on mathematics... but still no mention of Aryabhata amazes me
I wonder if "coxcomb" became "honeycomb" because people are more familiar with honeycombs and because they don't sound rude? I'd also assume that Florence Nightingale was thinking about the rooster's comb, rather than the jester's hat: the diagram does look a lot like that.
We have similar diagrams in transmission line theory, see Smith-diagrams. Also, power engineering see Clarke- and Park-transformations.
They are used in cricket as well
Never thought I could use COVID deaths to find out when bank holidays are
Plotting a year's data is particularly useful for diseases, such as the flu, that are seasonable. The year-to-year differences stand out.
That's great. I guess I should do that for Germany and show it to the people claiming that "it's just another flu": showing that we have a lot of excess mortality *despite* our measures.
The thing missing from these kinds of studies is age demographics; there is a pretty clear trend of the disease killing 55+ individuals and having ignored that fact, in the US at least, we have not properly addressed the issue and worse, taken measures that have done horrible economic damage without reason.
On Brady´s question about why these diagrams are uncommon, I think it may be due to stackability, sqares are stackable and circles are not. And newspapers became a race for using space in the most efficient manner.
Honeycomb-diagram sounds very similar to the dutch "Hanekam-diagram". Hanekam is the literal translation of cockscomb (so that fleshy thing on the head of a rooster).
Sounds like Professor Merrifield was channeling his inner Matt Parker. "Up next on Numberphile, The Merrifield Square!"
feels kind of akin to n-sided polygon/newtons method for calculating pi, ie the precise value is orbited , it's often easier to track a object by circling "aim" around it, than trying to sight it directly. used practically for conical scanning. also many optimisation by hillclimbing algorithms.
number tier list when?
Helpful for cycling analysis, but not really a cleaner way to look at it, especially, since data entry is a step function for December- January every year.
I think what you're saying, and what is lost in the video, is that COVID deaths are affected by the season (as does flu and other respiratory diseases) and this plot would make that clear and also remain readable as to the differences between the years. Deaths of soldiers in war is also usually seasonally-related (depending on the climate of the warzone.)