Scott Klein's team at Propublica published a worthy news application, called "Hell and High Water" (link) I took some time taking in the experience. It's a project that needs room to breathe. The setting is Houston Texas, and the subject...
Scott Klein's team at Propublica published a worthy news application, called "Hell and High Water" (link) I took some time taking in the experience. It's a project that needs room to breathe. The setting is Houston Texas, and the subject...
Reader Jeffrey S. saw this graphic inside a Dec 2 tweet from the National Weather Service (NWS) in Phoenix, Arizona. In a Trifecta checkup (link), I'd classify this as Type QV. The problems with the visual design are numerous and...
Via Twitter, Pat complained that this Bloomberg graphic is confusing: The accompanying article is here. The gist of the report is that electric cars are much more popular on the West coast because the fuel efficiency of such cars goes...
Introduction Functional programming (FP) is a programming style that emphasises the use of referentially transparent pure functions and immutable data structures. Higher order functions (HOFs) tend to be used extensively to enable a clean functional programming style. A HOF is just a function that either takes a function as an argument or returns a function. … Continue reading HOFs, closures, partial application and currying to solve the function environment problem…
I discussed the rose chart used in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report last week. This type of data is always challenging to visualize. One should start with an objective. If the goal is a data dump, that is to...
At the conference in Bavaria, Jay Emerson asked participants to provide comments on the data visualization of the 2014 Environmental Performance Index (link). We looked at the country profiles in particular. Here is one for Singapore: The main object of...
Those who attended my dataviz talks have seen a version of the following chart that showed up yesterday on New York Times (link): This chart shows the fluctuation in Arctic sea ice volume over time. The dataset is a simple...
Only 6% of crashes in New Zealand involve foreign drivers, according to the latest figures provided by the Ministry of Transport. But in some remote regions of the South Island particularly popular with tourists for their scenery... foreign drivers are involved in about a quarter of all crashes. These sentences come from a CNN article about a vigilante movement in those regions popular with tourists. The vigilantes snatch car keys…
Chapter 1 of Numbersense (link)uses the example of U.S. News ranking of law schools to explore the national pastime of ranking almost anything. Since there is no objective standard for the "correct" ranking, it is pointless to complain about "arbitrary" weighting and so on. Every replacement has its own assumptions. A more productive path forward is to understand how the composite ranking is created, and shine a light on the…
Merry Christmas, readers. *** A Twitter follower pointed me to this visual: I have yet to understand why the vertical axis of the top chart keeps changing scales over time. The white dot labelled "Peak 1982" (70 million) is barely...
