The color of Statistics

Before I begin to say anything, review the animated picture in this weeks issue. Does one color scheme make you feel more comfortable? What do you think they represent (does it matter)? Why do you think those colors where chosen? Who is the intended audience? I could easily go on with the questions but let me tell you now that they both represent exactly the same thing. Although I redid the map, I left one with the original color scheme with shades of blue and updated the other with mine with are shades of red. Does giving you this additional information help you at all to figure out what it is showing?

What I am trying to demonstrate this week is something that us visual artists have always known, that the use of color affects your mood, perception and can even modify your beliefs on an issue. The image represents a real and growing problem in the United States, it is based off hard data from the CDC (Centre for Disease Control). This is data that politicians, agencies and companies around the world use to track their interests. How many of you have gotten a pile of papers and at the end was a graphic and just skipped right to it - I know for me I look at pictures first.

So lets recap, both images are showing the same data from a CDC statistical study with the only difference being color. If you had only a few seconds to look at this image, my guess is that if you saw the blue one you would say “hey, we aren’t doing too bad”, if I showed you the red one you would say “holly $#@$, we got to do something”. Isn’t it amazing how much feeling has been generated by a simple picture? What you are looking at is the 2003 data for the growing diabetes epidemic in the USA (and worldwide). What you see in dark blue (or red) are states where over 6% of their population has diabetes. I am sure it’s even higher now then 2 years ago. To put this into perspective, 6% is essentially 1 person with diabetes for every 14 individuals.

Now imagine if this represented a disease or infection such as HIV, Herpes, Malaria, TB or Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) where the population had over 6% infection rate - would you use blue or red?