The Art of Drawing Spectacular Graphs

Bloomberg Business has a feature on the decline of the Euro after the Greek “No” vote last night. As you might expect, the feature is accompanied by a graphic which shows a “precipitous fall” in the European currency.

I’m in two minds of whether to screenshot the graphic (so that any further changes are not reflected), or to not plagiarise by simply putting a link (but exposing this post to the risk of becoming moot, if Bloomberg changes its graphs later on. It seems like the graphic on the site is a PNG, so let me go ahead and link to it:

You notice the spectacular drop right? Cliff-like. You think the Euro is doomed now that the Greeks have voted “no”? Do not despair, for all you need to do is to look at the axis, and the axis labels.

The “precipitous drop” that is indicated by the above graph indicates a movement of the EUR/USD from about 1.11 to about 1.10. Or a fall of 0.88%, as the text accompanying the graph says! And given how volatile the EUR/USD has been over the last couple of months (look at graph below), this is not that significant!

eurusd

 

I won’t accuse Bloomberg of dishonesty since they’ve clearly mentioned “0.88%”, but they sure know how to use graphics to propagate their message!

Moron the corruption issue

Following my previous post and comments and countercomments and discussions on twitter and facebook and google groups and various other forums, I’ve been thinking about this whole corruption thing. Random thoughts. The kind that comes to you when you’re traveling across the city by auto on a hot summer day, watching the world go by.

Ok so this is for the people who claim that the supporters of Anna Hazare are a large enough group that they probably represent “most of the people”. If this were the case, we have a simple solution to corruption – all these worthies can band together in the form of an “anti corruption party” (when was the last time we had a political party being formed on a solid ideology?) and contest the next elections. And if they can work hard, and ensure that they keep up the kind of efforts they’ve started, they’ll soon be ruling us. And hopefully they’ll continue with their zeal and be actually able to eradicate corruption. (on my end, I promise that if a credible party gets formed with an anti-corruption stand, I’ll get over my NED, get myself registered as a voter and vote for them).

But there are reasons to doubt something like this will happen. A look at the list of nominal supporters Anna Hazare got suggests that a lot of people were there just to be seen and get footage, rather than really wanting to weed out corruption. Again, given the political spectrum across which Hazare’s supporters last week came from, it might not be that easy an idea to form this “anti-corruption party” that I suggested.

Thinking about it further, there is a scary thought – that a large part of our population is actually pro-corruption. And looking at the political parties across the spectrum, it doesn’t sound implausible. So if a large number of people are actually pro-corruption, what are we to do?

Let me put it another way. How many people do you think are really anti-corruption? On all fronts? How many people do you think exist in India who haven’t paid or received a single bribe, however small that might be? Basically I want to estimate the number of people who are against corruption of all kinds, and my sense is that this number is likely to be small indeed.

I think one needs to think about this further before actually figuring out how to weed out corruption. From what I’ve read so far the Lok Pal bill simply adds one extra protective layer, and am not sure of its effectiveness. More about this in another post.

Democracy

So next Saturday Shivamma, my aunt’s full-time maid, is going all the way back to her village near Challakere (Chitradurga district, Karnataka; six hours away from Bangalore) just to cast her vote in the Gram Panchayat (village council) elections.

My aunt can’t let go of her for more than a day but Shivamma’s relatives are really insistent that she exercises her franchise. They say that her visit to the village would be worth it even if she won’t be able to spend much time there apart from casting her vote!

Shows how much every single vote matters when the number of voters is low!