Florence Nightingale, Statistical Graphics Pioneer 204
Science News has a fascinating look at an under-appreciated corner of the career of Florence Nightingale — as an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to argue for social change. Nightingale returned from the Crimean War a heroine in the eyes of the British citizenry, for the soldiers' lives she had saved. But she came to appreciate that the way to save far more lives was to reform attitudes in the military about sanitation. Under the tutelage of William Farr, who had just invented the field of medical statistics, she compiled overwhelming evidence (in the form of an 830-page report) of the need for change. "As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change."
oh god (Score:5, Informative)
Re:oh god (Score:5, Interesting)
This is /., remember? You're asking far too much to expect the so-called editors to use a spelling checker. Which came first, /. or the toilet?
(I'm just extra annoyed since I've been a professional technical editor and rewriter for some years. Now after the nameless morons get through playing their moderation games I'll probably be seriously pissed--but that's the primary reaction I ever have to /. these days. I'm convinced that /. is just another interesting idea run into the ground.)
Re:oh god (Score:5, Funny)
It's only fair that you be extra annoyed. As a technical editor and rewriter for many years you have undoubtedly pissed off many people yourself.
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No, it seems the professional researchers I work with highly value constructive criticism before they send papers to the referees. We're basically on the same team, but specialists in different areas. My pitch is that it's a LCD thing. First-class research with a third-class description does not get averaged to second class.
However, /. is not to be confused with a prestigious international conference.
I used to visit /. because a reasonable percentage of the +5 funny posts actually were funny. A smaller (but
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Yet, you still come here and even contribute. You probably support government censorship of TV, radio and video game content. "Please, someone, pass some legislation so I don't have to think for myself and change channels or buy a different video game!"
Seriously, f
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Ugh. . neither came first, they both came from a single thing that slowly evolved into that system. Perhaps something like the droppings of a dog who had recently eaten some poor kid's science report. Or a soiled diaper made from newspaper.
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No kidding.
I don't know what's up with the fundament haberdashery lately, but this is inexcusable.
Calling the slashdot editors "editors" is like calling the janitor "sanitary engineer"
No, wait, I'm being unfair to the janitors. At least they do their jobs.
--
BMO
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kdawson is not known for accuracy, grammar, correct spelling, timeliness or any other attribute one might associate with someone using the title of "editor".
oh, those silly editors. (Score:2)
Tagged "oheditors"
And let's just admit it (Score:2)
They should concentrate on defeating the Czars, not appointing them.
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Never mind the editors: what kind of imbecile spells the name wrong not once but three times when he includes a quotation which contains the correct spelling?
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It's a sign of the time that people seem to misspell "e" and "i" all the time.
So soon et siims to mii that iviryoni es goeng to swap thim around.
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The sad thing is that it is spelled correctly twice in the quote from the article. An other sad thing is that the misspelling has been on slashdot for over 8hs, and you posted about it within 2 minutes. You would assume that the kdawson would at least check the chatter of the articles a bit and correct the typos since he posted 3 more stories in the hours after this one.
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I always consider I'm onto a loser when I begin a sentence with:
"You'd think that..."
or
"You would assume..." ...especially when people are involved.
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Heck, if it had been me I would have misspelled it on porpose just to piss people off.
Prior art on Microsoft. (Score:5, Funny)
So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts.
So, in other words, she invented PowerPoint.
Prior art in the Economist (Score:2, Informative)
It appears they are finaly getting around to last years issues.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10278643 [economist.com]
>
Re:Prior art on Microsoft. (Score:5, Funny)
For the same reason we named our planet "Dirt" - self-esteem issues ...
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I hate to break it to you, but in 32000 years, nobody is going to care where a bunch of damn dirty apes who barely even made it to their own moon came from.
Um maybe, but I interpreted tomhudsons post as a Harry Harrison reference. Modern humans are at least 100000 years old, so I wouldn't be surprised if we are still around in this form in another 100000 years.
Re:Prior art on Microsoft. (Score:5, Funny)
which, ironically, has 2/3 of its surface covered by water. I guess "Mud" would have been a better choice.
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Re:Prior art on Microsoft. (Score:4, Interesting)
The fault isn't the tool, the fault is education.
I can hardly count the number of managers I've met who've claimed to be "visual thinkers". Without denying such a thing might exist, I've seldom seen any evidence of outstanding "visual reasoning" from such people.
For example, I often use diagrams as an adjunct to my reasoning, and find that "visual thinkers" often have strong opinions about the aesthetic aspects of these diagrams. Seldom is the opinion about things in the diagram that carry semantic information: spatial, thematic or topological relationships for example. Furthermore, their aesthetic contributions aren't very aesthetically sophisticated, demonstrating of bad typography choices, cluttered compositions, insensitivity to color complementarity and value.
I call their claims into doubt because I have known unusual individuals who could be described as visual thinkers. One was an architect who was nearly incomprehensible without a pencil in his hand, but wonderfully eloquent with one. None of these people ever claimed to be "visual thinkers", as if that were a loftier kind of cognition. I suspect that's because it is not how a "visual thinker" would conceive of or express the distinction between themselves and "normal".
It is my opinion that the popularity of claiming to be a "visual thinker" stems from "visual reasoning" not being part of most people's education. An opinion justified as "visual thinking" is therefore unlikely to meet an informed challenge. Put most "visual thinkers" in front of a panel of artists or architects, and they will be reluctant to claim that label for themselves.
I happen to think that computer based presentations are very useful communications tools, but you really have to start by having something worth saying.
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I was the one that modded it as a troll (and by posting here I am undoing it). It is now modded +5 Funny, and yeah in hindsight it is funny. But at the time I modded it Troll, it was +2 Insightful, which I thought was an abomination. Insightful?
I was thinking in particular over all of the critisism powerpoint (and other packages) have received for making it so easy to produce manipulative and misleading graphics. Plenty of stuff on Edward Tufte's site, eg on Nasa abusing powerpoint [edwardtufte.com] to mislead managem
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Ok, but it invites you to mislead. It would be quite possible to design it in a way that encourages good practice. I mean, Microsoft are already masters at inane dialog boxes. If clippy popped up and asked "are you sure you want to chop off the axes of this plot?", or "are you sure that your bullet points accurately represent the data?" it would make statisticians very happy (as well as pissed off at the interference :-)
Tools can be designed with a focus on best practice, or they can be designed to ap
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Must we malign this truly amazing woman with the word(s) "PowerPoint?"
You're right. I apologize.
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I'm guessing you're originally from the area of the river running between the countries of Crimea and Fughen; the Crimea-Fughen river.
Ah, not a country actually -- just Minnesota. Which has over 10,000 lakes, but no rivers named Crimea or Fughen that I know of. I do have some crackers here though to go with that wine of yours. You're welcome to come over eh.
Better graph (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Better graph (Score:4, Informative)
You could have read the page the post you're replying to links to:
You and I are shown graphs every day. Some are honest; many are misleading. Nightingale could, for example, have scaled deaths according to the radius, instead of the area, of the segments. That would've strengthened her case. But it would've misled people, since area is what the eye sees.
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I did read that page, but it only says what she *could* have done. It makes no claim to say what she *did* do, let alone provide evidence. The page that that page links to states that the figure caption indicates area is used, but it would be good to see actual numbers.
Remarkable predicament (Score:2)
Thanks to her, I get it (Score:5, Funny)
Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:4, Interesting)
If she'd been a man presenting this, she'd have made the equivalent of surgeon general in her career. -_- No joke--Despite the blessing of Queen Victoria herself, she was denied a chairman position that oversaw general health affairs in the military. I doubt there's an academic statistics book currently in circulation that gives her any credit for this. Even this--a zine read by only a tiny, tiny fraction of the people who go to school every year and rely on her innovation. Hell, the entire field of field medicine was in disrepute at that time in history -- who needs medicine? Most nurses spent at least part of their time in the kitchen, which was viewed as more important. She made it important. It's been two centuries since then and she's still only a footnote. Today, graphical statistics are used in every trained discipline from engineering to medicine to management, but nobody knows this woman's name. They should -- they owe her a lot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:4, Insightful)
But conversely, if she was a man nobody would feel the need to write an article about it.
Of course they would: great people are great people, and their accomplishments stand by themselves. The difference is, if she were a man, her (uh, his) sex wouldn't be worthy of note.
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Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe; from the little I know she seemed very capable. But conversely, if she was a man nobody would feel the need to write an article about it.
You're absolutely right, nobody would feel they had to. When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments. Two hundred years and you've just underscored how very little things have changed. When people no longer have to go out of their way to find and honor the contributions of women, when their names simply added to the book without a second thought -- then we'll have progress.
Thank you for showing us just how deeply sexism pervades our society, even amongst the most technical and literate of the population (like here, on slashdot).
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:5, Funny)
... even amongst the most technical and literate of the population (like here, on slashdot).
Ah ha ... now there's where you went wrong.
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When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments.
Conversely, when a woman *is* acknowledged for her objective accomplishments, it's invariably accompanied by some mention about the tribulations she endured because of her sex, and how she didn't get "the recognition she deserved." It happens with such extreme regularity that it has become trite, and frankly speaking, counterproductive.
They've done studies which have found that signs such as "Please leave things where they are. This nature area is being destroyed by a large number of people taking souvenirs
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I saw a recent blog post which was lamenting the fact that, when asked to name a women scientist, most college students name Marie Curie, with a smattering of Barbara McClintock, ignoring all the other women scientist. No one in the comments stopped to consider that when asked to name a male scientist, most would have responded Albert Einstein, with perhaps a smattering of Richard Feynman, ignoring all the other male scientists. Yet somehow gender was thought to play a major role in those other female scientists being marginalized in this example.
Hmmm. That may be a leap. Being a female scientist in and of itself causes a certain level of marginalization. That doesn't mean it can't be overcome (as with any stereotype). Discrimination is usually pervasive but subtle. Gender discrimination effects those who are truly talented less than those who are average because it's harder to ignore real talent. But for the mediocre -- the lab assistant, the post-doc, the grunts of the community, discrimination looms large in their world.
And to answer to another p
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You're absolutely right, nobody would feel they had to. When a woman is acknowledged it's out of pity or some emotive source. When a man is acknowledged it's because of his (objective) accomplishments.
If I tell you I walked 10km, you might say, "that's no objective achievement!" But then I say, I walked 10km to the peak of Mount Everest, with several people trying to keep me from doing so, then THAT'S an objective achievement. Even if I weren't the first to get to the top of Mount Everest.
The point is, c
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And just for the fun of it, what other developed western nations have elected a black man to the highest office? I'm just saying that for all the applauding in Europe, I don't believe even one of the nations has done so, nor Canada, and I'm not sure I can name a major nation anywhere outside of Africa which has done so.
Perhaps I'm ignorant of things, but while we definitely have problems with racism, we are in pretty rare company to have been willing to vote him in.
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I rest my case. Most of the rest of the world doesnt care. :P
But I'll humor you. I'm a Aussie.
If we look at the CIA factsheet, we see that 92% of Australians are white, 7% are Asian and 1% are Aboriginal.
We've only had 26 Prime Ministers so we are ok so far.
Obama is as much white as black (Score:3, Insightful)
Except calling Obama "black" is inherently racist.
His mother is white.
His father is black.
Shouldn't that make him "half-black" or "half-white"? How about being "Kenyan-European"? Or does the European parts of his mother's heritage need to be broken out, making him "Kenyan-English-Irish-German"?
How about him just being "American", and only mention his heritage when it is relevant, like when asked where his parents were born.
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How about him just being "American", and only mention his heritage when it is relevant, like when asked where his parents were born.
How about when describing what he looks like, are we allowed to use color adjectives then?
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You can say whatever the fuck you want.
You would be describing his skin color if you don't use the phrase "African-American".
Except, if you go by actual color, he isn't black, and I am not white.
"Brown" to "light brown" is much closer to his skin color.
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Note that Obama identifies himself as "a black man of mixed heritage".
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They've reinforced my prejudices.
Not much has changed.
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Only shows how little you know.
Her work was not just capable, it was revolutionary, and it is noted not because she was a woman but because it was groundbreaking in several fields central to modern civilization, largely founding one of them. It would have attracted attention in any case. And it did.
What the parent to your post quite rightly claimed was merely that such accomplishments, in that time, were it by a man, would normally bring with it not just recognition but a high position and significant power
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No offence, but graphical representation and statistics was used from Archimedes days by your so-hated by feminists "men". This is how our brains work.
And no, Ada Byron wasn't the first programmer.
Sorry to burst your shiny little bubbles, girl.
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No offence, but graphical representation and statistics was used from Archimedes days by your so-hated by feminists "men". This is how our brains work.
Sure, but that's irrelevant. It was her application of those techniques, her recognition of the need, and her perseverance in the face of considerable resistance that are admirable. She was a remarkable individual, whether you agree with girlintraining's estimation or not.
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I agree, but calling her "First human to use graphical representation of data" (Pioneer) is completely bullshit. The same bullshit as calling Ada Lovelace (Byron) to be the first programmer.
I'm just sick of feminists claiming positions they do not deserve. Just use your brains to get the titles you need. No corner-cutting, no vagina using, no feminist propaganda, no tricks, just raw thinking power.
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No corner-cutting, no vagina using, no feminist propaganda, no tricks
Well. Some would say that's just working from your strengths.
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>> No corner-cutting, no vagina using, no feminist propaganda, no tricks
Well. Some would say that's just working from your strengths.
Hey, did you hear the story about the person who was born with both sex organs? Apparently, they had a penis and a brain.
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That would be funny if the brain was a sex organ.
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That would be funny if the brain was a sex organ.
Well if you had one you might have a different opinion.
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You do of course realize that you're at least as bad as the, presumably, male posters you're arguing with, right?
I've got a tremendous amount of respect for women, but really women do a piss poor job of treating men with any sort of meaningful respect. I've been fortunate enough in recent years to deal with a higher class of women, but really being liberated isn't any reason for being rude.
It isn't a feature of liberation to behave in a similarly boorish manner to the men that are being shouted down for beh
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Dude, you so need to get laid.
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Also saying "no offense" is kind of negated by saying "Sorry to burst your shiny little bubbles, girl". No offense, but "No offense" isn't a Get to Act Like an Ass Free Card.
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:5, Interesting)
So she didn't get to a high station because she was a woman in a society thats over 100 years dead, that really sucks for her, but only marginally relevant today.
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o she didn't get to a high station because she was a woman in a society thats over 100 years dead, that really sucks for her, but only marginally relevant today.
Today a black President, tomorrow ...
Just a note... (Score:2)
I'm assuming you were going to end that sentence with 'a woman President.'. I just feel the need to point out that, in every way that matters for a leader, there's a much bigger difference genders than between races.
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You're saying I could be a male Rosa Parks by refusing to leave a womans sauna??
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:4, Interesting)
FN wanted the Crimean statistics to look as horrifying as possible.
The little Huff book is excellent, and very well known (and inexpensive!), so I think that most people who've read a bit about statistics probably already know the Florence Nightingale story.
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:5, Interesting)
If slavery existed in this country than abolitionism would be relevant today. It is not.
The constitution is still relevant today because the issue of the rights and power of the government is still ongoing, the rights of slaves and Jews aren't. Battles fought, won, buried. womans lib is still hanging on.
I understand history very well, and I stand by my statement. Womans lib has destroyed itself through success. It has become marginalized in todays society because there really isn't any systematic discrimination left for them to strike down. I'm sure you'll disagree with that statement, but I have stopped listening to fringe groups spout about their relevance years ago, be them Marxists, La Rouch, Gold-bugs, neo-cons or feminists. If your so big on womans lib go to Afghanistan where there are still battles to be fought. In the US all thats left is marginalized gripes about textbooks, maternity leave, sexual advertising, and pushing statistically dubious arguments about wage gaps.
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider this as my challenge to your statement: Go to work for the next week in female attire appropriate to your work environment and tell me how well that works for you.
Why would I? I know what will happen and so do you, but it doesn't mean jack about systematic discrimination. The social mores that exist have more to do with Sexual Dimorphism and gender differences that even baboons exhibit. I will guarantee you they are supported just as strongly by women It is not patriarchal repression that makes dumb girls slaves to fashion, but the same force that also makes dumb men slaves to power tools and guns. You can rail against gender differences if you want, I've yet to hear a good argument though.
:-p
Besides I look terrible in Heels
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The Suffragettes argued for the right to vote. Arguing for the right to vote today would be an anachronism at best. Your parent post seemed to be arguing against Gender Discrimination using it's loss to society as an example of why Gender Discrimination was bad, a position that's accepted unquestionably in the US.
My position i
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Oh, fuck off. Guantanamo Bay is an atrocity that blackens the good name of the United States and for which I hope the name of George W. Bush will be remembered with greater loathing even than Nixon. But it is nothing remotely like the Holocaust - it's similar only insofar as it's a prison camp. Call me when they install gas chambers there.
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So you are asking someone to deliberately make themselves stand out from normal for no reason and then be expected to be treated the same way ?
This is what pisses me off about your type. You don't wa
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It was about attacking and marginalizing a minority.
Uh ... what? I'm not even Jewish and I have to say, that's pretty far off base. I suppose you could call attempted genocide "marginalizing a minority". I suppose. Most of us would call the Holocaust by its proper name: mass murder, murder on a Biblical scale. The black population of the United States has been marginalized for a long time (less so in recent decades, perhaps) but we're not packing them into freight cars and shipping them off to be killed en masse.
And just by way of comparison, Guantanemo B
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You're seriously comparing the historical significance one individual's recognition in her own time or her "social station" to the holocaust, slavery, and the "morons" of the American Revolution. Did I get all that right? Maybe her social strata is still relevant today, but I'm edging toward "bring up the nazis and you immediately lose."
"So she didn't get to a high station because she was a woman in a society thats over 100 years dead."
Please don't forget the forest while you're looking at the trees.
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:4, Insightful)
>She made it important. It's been two centuries since then and she's still only a footnote.
I don't know about that. She was possibly one of only three important people in the history of medicine that I learned about when I was a child here in the UK. And my impression was that she was somewhat sainted (despite any lack of formal 'establishment' status); regarded as a genuine heroine to be lauded by all.
(The others were Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur).
Re:Mod me down, but you know I'm right (Score:5, Informative)
While I completely agree that she was not given the prestiege due her while she was alive, I think you underestimate her fame in the time since. There have been [wikipedia.org] monuments erected in her honour, museums named after her, and books, television shows, and no fewer than 4 films about her, and I think she could reasonably accurate be described as a household name today (who hasn't at least heard the name?). Most of them concentrate on her contribution to our understanding of sanitation (in which she was truly revolutionary) and nursing, but I do not think that she could reasonably be described as lacking in recognition in the modern era.
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Florence Nightingale wasn't overlooked, she was regarded as a popular hero of the time, and when I was a kid, she was on the back of the UK Ten Pound Note! If anything, her fame probably unfairly eclipsed that of a number of other people who also deserve to be reme
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I think Nightengale and Curie (and let's not forget Franklin) realized that the only way to be taken seriously in fields dominated by men was undeniable achievement.
Psst... It's the ONLY way to be taken seriously. Even for men.
I wouldn't want to cram a history textbook full of people without undeniable achievment.
The Lady Tasting Tea (Score:2, Interesting)
...by David Salsburg mentioned Florence Nightingale (jeez, who proofreads Slashdot contributions?):
Credit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not given due credit? Whu? (Score:2)
When I was growing up, the two historic people everyone knew from UK banknotes were Isaac Newton and Florence Nightingale.
How much more credit would it be possible for one person to get?
Polar graphs are often very misleading (Score:2, Insightful)
Presenting this kind of data - abolute numbers and their breakdown into individual contributors,
for consecutive, identical intervals of time - in a polar graph as some kind of piechart is a very bad idea.
Piecharts are good to represent relative parts of a whole, by segmenting a circle. That's it. As soon as a radial
component is included (as is the case here - it even is the main component), they become at least misleading,
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This poster is right on the money. If you click through to TFA (*gasp*), at the bottom they have a link to a flash widget allowing you to switch between (digitally recreated versions of) the Nightingale's Rose graphs, and a simple bar chart showing the same data.
The bar chart is ridiculously easier to read and still makes the same point about causes of death just as strongly - even more so, because it's actually understandable.
If only I had mod points.
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The Areas of the blue, red, & black wedges are each measured from the centre as the common vertex.
The blue wedges measured from the centre of the circle represent area for area the deaths from Preventable or Mitigable Zymotic diseases, the red wedges measured from the centre the deaths from wounds, & the black wedges measured from the centre the deaths from all other causes.
I think it would insult your intelligence (although not your attention span) if I were to comment further on these perfectly lucid sentences.
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This graph cannot be understood without additional information.
No graph can. Today we have many established idioms for graphs that provide that extra information (and that some graphs try to exploit to mislead us).
Back then all this was fairly new.
But, yeah, bars have the advantage that they work whether you read them by area or length.
The disadvantage is that if you have both very small and very large values, they become hard to compare and the small ones will be hard to read. If you vary more than one dimension of each 'blob', you can express a larger range of valu
Inventor?!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
From even the summery:
"""
Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously
"""
So, she didn't invent them then, now did she. One of the first, fine. One of the ones to popularise its use, fine. But, invent, hardly.
Leading ultimately to more casualties (Score:2, Funny)
Proves that good intentions may cause unexpected harm. Here development ultimately lead to Death by Powerpoint casualties.
Full circle. She couldn't win.
Bert
From a bio of Nightingale by Lucy Parsons (Score:3, Interesting)
History is full of women who's contributions have been forgotten. Another one is Lucy [iww.org] Parsons [wikipedia.org]. Her and her husband were anarchist labour leaders in Chicago where they helped organize the events known as the Haymarket Riots which gave the rest of the world May Day.
The Chicago police called her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" and she was a major influence on labor politics until she died in a house fire in 1942 that also consumed most of her many writings.
In 1905 she wrote this piece for The Liberator, published October 22:
FAMOUS WOMEN OF HISTORY: Florence Nightingale
Amid the general consternation, the minister of war wrote a letter to Miss Nightingale, stating that he considered her the only person in Great Britain capable of bringing order out of confusion, and imploring her to organize and direct the reform of the military hospitals; and this letter was crossed by one from Miss Nightingale, volunteering to place her strength and ability at the service of her nation. Good trained nurses were almost unknown quantities in those days; yet, nothing daunted, Florence Nightingale sailed from England with thirty of the best nurses that she could muster within the week from her letter. In required a good deal of tact to overcome the prejudices and jealousies among the physicians and surgeons at the "womanly prominence" and the conciliate the general disapproval of medical and military officials. For these were the days when it was considered that "the proper place for the woman is at home."
Overcoming professional jealousy, she set herself to the task of cleansing the Augean hospitals containing over 4,000 patients. These barrack hospitals at Scutari, which had been loaned to the British government by the Sultan of Turkey, were 100 feet above the Bosporus. The day before the arrival of the staff of nurses the wounded from Balaclava had been landed; packed in the overcrowded transports, their wounds had not been dressed for five days, and cholera and fever were reaping their fearful harvest. The poor men outside with cold and starvation were faring far better than the sufferers in the tainted wards of the disordered hospitals.
-------------
I got this out of "Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity" [iww.org].
Off the top of my head, some other woman who have been mostly forgotten include Elizabeth Gurley Flynn [wikipedia.org] (a co-founder of the ACLU), Ada Lovelace [wikipedia.org] (perhaps earliest programmer), Hedy Lamarr [wikipedia.org] (co-invented spread spectrum wireless communications years before it was technologically practical to implement, but better known for being a babe). How many people here know the name Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org]? All of these women and many more excelled in male dominated fields.
Dr. John Snow (Score:5, Informative)
well... (Score:3, Insightful)
"...an innovator in the use of statistical graphics..."
Really? I'd have said that she was an innovator in the use of statistical graphics to MISLEAD and 'spin' her data to enhance what she wanted to show (so in that sense, I guess she was in fact ahead of her time, the foremother of all crappy powerpoint presentations).
Why do I malign such a wonderful woman? Because her presentation is misleading and not so terribly well-presented in terms of either accuracy or simplicity.
1) while the method of graphing the data is perhaps novel in it's way of advancing over time, it's NOT USEFUL. It's finite - once you've determined the proportion each pie piece is of the circumference, that's it. If your pie pieces are going to each be 30 degrees, you get 12 data points, and that's IT...have a 13th point? Sorry, need to start another roundel (or whatever it's called) subsecting the data in ways that are at least hard to interpret and possibly misleading.
2) circular (area) presentations of linear data should always make the viewer suspicious, and this is no exception. Circular data emphasizes change in disproportional ways, as recognized and explained perfectly by Tufte. For example if you're showing your information as 'circles of relative size' but your data is implemented as the diameter of those circles, a simple doubling of the diameter actually increases the AREA of the circles (what your eye instinctively recognizes) by FOUR. So if you want to mislead people that a small increase really 'feels' quite a bit larger, circular graphs are the ticket. This is precisely what FN did here. Her goal was to show the HUGE number of 'preventable' deaths, and she did this in two ways: first, she chose the circular-presentation which exaggerates increases by ballooning the area disproportionally to the actual numeric increase. Secondly, she even further stacked the graphs, pushing preventables out to the circumference of the circle, further exaggerating the numbers because they were then stacked ATOP the death data, sneakily increasing the radius (and thus the displayed 'area') even if preventables did NOT increase.
She obviously had the best of intentions, but let's recognize this 'graph' for what it is: a very clever presentation of highly massaged data to induce an administrator to come to the conclusion desired. It's propaganda, nothing more. Well intentioned, but still propaganda.
So clearly, she's not simply the mother of the Red Cross, but the ancestor of all modern hatable powerpoint quackery to the present day.
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She used graphs to make a point about the importance of cleanliness. Why is this on /.? And why was it in Science News? Slow week...
It's just history, which is often fascinating in its own right, and a rather important part of it at that. You (like most of us) take a lot for granted.
Florence Nightingale's accomplishments are particularly relevant in the context of modern medical science, when you consider how much of that advancement is a direct result of efforts made to improve field medicine. By presenting her case and the facts in such a way as to persuade the powers-that-were in her time to increase that investment, she did all o
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Because she was the first nerd who ever used interesting graphs to impress a PHB. Bonus points that the graphs were scientifically valid and useful.
She matters for the same reason that people still care about 1-2-3 or the 4004.
She also matters because a lot of people lived who otherwise wouldn't have.
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... this, coming from a woman who wholesalely was the greatest single cause of spreading V.D. amongst the troops. True. Look it up.
Saavik: iic veni... komi. (He's so... human.)
Spock: liingeth flamii bufith*, Saavik. (Nobody's perfect, Saavik.)
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Now, wait and see how long it will take someone to translate the Natalie Portman meme into Klingon...
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I presume you have references to support your slanderous remarks other then "Look it up", or are you simply someone who is being a -10 flame baiter or even quite possible just a -10 asshole?