Data Tables for Dummies

Sample of a data table

Spend enough time surfing the internet, and it's a safe bet you'll run across someone, somewhere, willing to say anything for a buck. Oh, sure, we've all heard of crack whores and other criminals so desperate for dollars that they'll do anything, but these people, for the most part, anyway; seem to be reasonably well-educated types who just wanted to pick up a little pin money. The problem, of course, is not that they said these things, the problem is that they didn't know jack shit when they said them. If you need an example, you need look no further than Serm Murmson, already a two-time winner of the DotD award (in Geography and Physics), who expanded his reach into mathematics when he pretended to answer a nonsensical question for Chron.com: "What is a Horizontal Axis in a Data Table?"

So let's be clear right up front: a data table doesn't have a horizontal axis or, for that matter, a vertical axis. A data table has rows and columns, and it might contain data pairs used to create a chart or graph with a horizontal axis, but – and here we repeat ourselves – data tables don't have axes!

But Serm wouldn't have made any money if he had told the dolts who run eHow.com / Demand Media / whatever that this is the case, so instead he proceeded to "answer" the question anyway. Along the way, of course, he screwed up – that's what Murmson usually did. Although he somehow managed to ferret out the fact that data tables don't have axes (yay, Serm!), he still displayed his usual ignorance: "A data table alone has no axes, horizontal or otherwise. It consists of points of data; each point describes at least two pieces of information." That's a rather tortured way to say that each line in a table corresponds to one datapoint, don't you think? He then went on to "explain" that "When converting a table to a graph, the points are plotted on a coordinate plane. On the coordinate plane, each point corresponds to different values regarding the two properties described by the horizontal and vertical axes..."

...which, of course, makes some sense for graphing data pairs, yet makes little or no sense in the creation of charts. But wait: Murmson had even more "information" about the horizontal axis:

"Typically, the horizontal axis describes a quantity that changes in a predictable fashion. In the case of a scientific experiment, the horizontal axis usually denotes the control variable. This variable is deliberately controlled by the experimenter in order to determine the effects that change has on other variables."

What: Serm couldn't find a reference that referred to "dependent" and "independent" variables? Why didn't he just say that the independent variable (usually) plots on the X axis? As we read on, we learned far more about Murmson's unfamiliarity with graphs and charts than we did about the graphs and charts themselves. Take this blunder, for instance:

"...if you are comparing the populations from three different years in a bar graph, the horizontal axis would merely have labels for each year. Corresponding bars would ascend from each of these points. In this case, the horizontal axis does not necessarily imply a continuous trend..."

...a statement that, frankly, left our researcher bewildered: WTF does that even mean? No, Serm (or whatever his real name is) clearly pulled all his factoids out of thin air, as usual. No wonder we're giving the guy yet another Dumbass of the Day award!

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