Joe Bemier wrote:
USA Today likes to print fancy looking charts and graphs
to go with a particular story. However, try to find the confidence
interval or standard deviation to go with the data. The charts are
nice, but unless we can see how the data was prepared and the
variable, it means very little.

Not only that-- the way they scale their charts is almost always
extremely misleading. Say, for example, they've got some stat that's
gone from 1012 up to 1097 over some period of time. That's under 8.5%,
not very impressive really. So they start the Y axis of the damned
chart at 1000 instead of zero and end at 1100. Now the number goes from
near the bottom to near the top, and it looks like whatever they're
reporting has octupled. It drives me crazy.