I deeply appreciate good design in data visualization, and this jumped out of my news queue today.

Conflicting views: Public versus scientists

I’m not going to comment on the content, except to say that for the most part I align myself with “AAAS scientists” — no surprise, right?  But imagine, for a moment, this data presented as a bar graph: “public” in red and “science” in blue.  Doesn’t this do a much better job conveying both “magnitude” and “difference”?