Unscientific polls of scientists

The graph below is an overly-creative variation on barplots, which I think confirms the principle “if you want to write the data values on the graph, it’s probably a bad graph”.

The data are supposed to be “time per day spent using mobile apps”.  Presumably it’s mean time per day, though I can’t tell whether the mean is restricted to people who spend non-zero time.  The graphs come from a “study” conducted by the “Science Advisory Board®”.  The “Science Advisory Board®” is an online survey panel for market research, where biomedical scientists are the market.  Or as they put it

The Board is an independent, worldwide panel of life science and medical professionals that convenes electronically to voice their opinions on a wide range of topics.

Here “convenes electronically” means “gets sent survey links by email”, and since I’m not a “member”, in my case this means spam about a survey on lab equipment.

The “Science Advisory Board®” homepage includes various things aimed at making their study samples feel like a community. There’s also widget that cycles through their past few days of Twitter feed at a rate of about one every five seconds, and, rather surprisingly for a company that wants to give the impression of solid opinion research, a clicky bogus poll™.