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To me, authors decision to use terrible 3D graphs and non zero Y axis makes makes me suspicious of his other decisions and comments.

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Agree that 3D graphs are terrible, but it's a canard that y-axes always need to start at 0 and that doing anything else is somehow misleading.

On this point, see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/

Y-axis need to start at zero when the data being presented is a bar graph and the bar is filled in. If it is a scatter plot with points being plotted, then it's generally not misleading to shift the axis.

I don't disagree with that - a bar chart that doesn't start at zero can be misleading. But for what he was trying to do---compare means---it would have been a perfectly fine choice to do a lineplot/very thin bar plot and start the y-axes somewhere other than zero if he included error bars and clearly labeled things.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

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