In her article, Dr. Szalinski, quotes Dr. Tracey Weissgerber,
an assistant professor in the Division of Nephrology and
Hypertension at the Mayo Clinic who said,
“We like bar graphs because they make data look clean and
neat and pretty, but data aren’t clean and neat and pretty. Everybody’s data are messy and sometimes that messiness isn’t
just noise, it’s critical information.”
I still see bar graphs used commonly on scientific posters,
at conferences, and in high impact journals. I, for one, will
avoid using bar graphs at all costs. After we’ve done all the
hard work and found something worth sharing with the scientific community, let’s share it fully. Do not hide your data;
show them in their full glory!
Michael Paolillo, USA
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Master’s
Program ‘15
Currently a GTC Doctoral student at the
Interfaculty Institute for Biochemistry in the lab of
Prof. Dr. Robert Feil
The title graphic was created by Leslee Lazar, PhD
1. Weissgerber TL, et al. (2015) Beyond Bar and Line Graphs: Time for a New Data Presentation Paradigm. PLoS Biol 13(4):e1002128.
FINCHES
Written by Vinay Jayaram
What are birds? Just wind-up toys,
given a tickle by the cherubic sun, off to set their clockwork tumbling?
And we eat it up rhapsodic, study their
ineffable blood and guts in labs, with cavernous machines
of din, we eat their song with beeping and with mashing
and with a polyrhythm of neurons snapping furious,
to and fro against a breeze nobody can feel,
not even the birds, any more, shut inside their cages
deep in the sterile shining walls of the lab.
On and on, the columns tumble and the song rolls free,
even as they sit fluorescent and immobile,
trailing their bloody wires because we cannot let song be.
Vinay Jayaram, USA
Currently a GTC Doctoral student at the MPI for Intelligent
Systems in the Machine Learning for Neural Engineering group
of Dr.-Ing. Moritz Grosse-Wentrup
July 2016 | NEUROMAG |
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