<story><title>Live Presidential Forecast</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>Jitter is a visualization of uncertainty. Rather than display a range, it displays a needle moving within that range.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it&amp;#x27;s a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.&lt;p&gt;Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn&amp;#x27;t one of them? I mean, really, an &amp;quot;abuse of our attention&amp;quot; - what?</text></item><item><author>yankyou</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d venture further to say it&amp;#x27;s a perversion of &amp;quot;news&amp;quot; for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.</text></item><item><author>the_duke</author><text>I just checked.&lt;p&gt;They gauges moving around is definitely random.&lt;p&gt;The updates are done with a &amp;quot;president.json&amp;quot; file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds.&lt;p&gt;So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging.&lt;p&gt;Maybe a bit disingenuous.&lt;p&gt;(Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of president.json)</text></item><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_duke</author><text>Yeah, I thought about it a little, and I guess you are right.&lt;p&gt;Only a dev would think about the possibility of a statistical model updated with a second(s) granularity.&lt;p&gt;And be disappointed (I was) that it&amp;#x27;s actually just updated every few minutes with a fetched JSON file, rather than some fancy instant updates pushed down via a websocket connection. :D</text></comment>
<story><title>Live Presidential Forecast</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/elections/forecast/president?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>Jitter is a visualization of uncertainty. Rather than display a range, it displays a needle moving within that range.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it&amp;#x27;s a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.&lt;p&gt;Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn&amp;#x27;t one of them? I mean, really, an &amp;quot;abuse of our attention&amp;quot; - what?</text></item><item><author>yankyou</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d venture further to say it&amp;#x27;s a perversion of &amp;quot;news&amp;quot; for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.</text></item><item><author>the_duke</author><text>I just checked.&lt;p&gt;They gauges moving around is definitely random.&lt;p&gt;The updates are done with a &amp;quot;president.json&amp;quot; file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds.&lt;p&gt;So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging.&lt;p&gt;Maybe a bit disingenuous.&lt;p&gt;(Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of president.json)</text></item><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yankyou</author><text>&amp;gt; Other than that it&amp;#x27;s a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.&lt;p&gt;No dispute that it&amp;#x27;s clever and entertaining. These are undesirable qualities in a reliable source of information.&lt;p&gt;Can you imagine reading a scientific journal in which the data narrative was deliberately engineered to keep you guessing until the conclusion? You would be right to raise eyebrows at a publication that is investing in your attention rather than its own accuracy.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no dire consequence here, it&amp;#x27;s just slightly dystopian that US presidential elections are unapologetically leveraged as a vehicle for mass entertainment by the press itself.</text></comment>