One of the more interesting first world challenges is data. So much data, so little time, all of it competing for attention. How are we to make sense of the world?

When there is so much information around it all gets a bit competitive. I’ve banged on about the idiocy of listicles and how the immediacy of social media makes people protesting in a park sound like a full blown revolution and how eye-grabbing stuff like twerk fail videos aren’t actually true.

Too much information is generally better than too little, by the way. In the olden days you didn’t get enough data and nobody knew why anything happened. I mean the really basic stuff. Yes the food was locally-sourced and organic but it was also rotten and famine-y, and you experienced puberty and a mid-life crisis simultaneously. Seriously, Google ‘the olden days’. It’s better now.

But the downside of our data-rich universe is that sensible boring data can get squeezed out, because our attention span is about a millisecond.

So anything that makes understanding our wonderful world a little bit easier to understand is a good thing, right? Which explains the rise of the infographic.

Kind of. If I had more of an attention span I’d do an amusing infographic about the fallibility of infographics.

It would have a big wall with things like ‘part true’, ‘reinforces my belief system but not actually true’ and ‘this was discredited years ago but is still believed in by angry mobs’ written on them. A big wrecking ball with ‘truth’ on it, driven by a flaming, maniacially twerking Miley Cyrus who would smash through these. Or something.

Have a look at this:

http://twistedsifter.com/2013/08/maps-that-will-help-you-make-sense-of-the-world/

It’s pretty amazing, and on things like the ‘reversed’ world, it can truly make you think about the world in a refreshing, new way*. It’s a thing that makes you go hmmm.

The problem is that not all of the information in there is true.

For example image number 24, titled ‘The Number of Researchers per Million Inhabitants Around the World’. Really interesting. I was amazed that anybody could have such accurate research data about the number of researchers across the world when my own research into research, which I’m doing for my day job, was proving so difficult.

It seemed too good to be true, and when I checked how they gathered this data, this turned out to be the case. In the clickable small print it said:

“This map shows the distribution of researchers per million inhabitants, latest available year. Researchers are professionals engaged in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods and systems and also in the management of the projects concerned.”

Now think about that. Would that describe your professional life? Yes? No? Don’t know? I would answer all three depending on which projects I was working on that week. Whether I’d had breakfast. It’s such a vague definition, it’s almost impossible to poll people on. Needless to say you’d need to ensure everybody was thinking of exactly the same definition when they were polled for this data to be accurate: you can imagine the possibility for linguistic and cultural interference introduced by an interviewer.

It doesn’t matter, because would seem that there wasn’t a universal poll at all. They didn’t go to Eritrea and New Zealand and Kazakhstan at all and ask people. The data came from a ‘range of sources’, all of whom collect data in slightly different ways. Sometimes they were counting state data from places where you don’t trust the state, for example.

Plus some of the data is old and some is new. The Algerian information appears to come from 2005, other bits from from 2012. Has anybody here changed their job in the last 7 years? If this is also true of Algeria, this would make the data wrong.

For other countries the original source quotes ‘partial data’ which implies that there is even more guesswork going on.

In other words, we have no idea about how many researchers there are across the world, but we do have a really nice memorable graph.

I don’t blame the graphic designer, btw, s/he’s done their job well, but like with all data-crunching, it’s rubbish in, rubbish out.

The original source is for this is from the UN Office of Statistics, which sounds respectable enough. The kind of thing journalists and politicians like to quote to prove their point, or make multi million pound spending decisions with. Click a few times to get to their working methods. It’s confusing and the site crashes a lot.

Is it important? Perhaps only to a pedantic dullard like me. I haven’t checked the others, but if they are wrong and people are coming up with a worldview based on this stuff, possibly because like Russell Brand they distrust mainstream media sources, it’s possibly a bad thing. It’s making wrong stuff easier to understand.

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ps I once invented a ‘brown triangle’ system for movies, which admittedly never caught on. The idea was that if the history was being totally made up but seemed possibly like it was true, you’d know because of the brown triangle.

Perhaps infographics based on facts that aren’t actually true could use the same system? That’s a graphic I did actually make, by the way, I hope you like it.

* as usual George Orwell got there first – this is an excellent essay on whether the earth is round and what to believe in general.

http://alexpeak.com/twr/hdykteir/