Happy Friday, all. We made it.
So today we enjoy an xkcd post about how graphic designers would change the country if they seized control.
Though to be fair, if this graphic designer seized control of the country, he would not be interested in just adjusting state borders. He’d probably work on the margins and bounds and then establish a whole new baseline grid.
Credit for the goes to Randall Munroe.
Yesterday the New York Times published a piece looking at the potential impacts of the proposed tax reforms on Americans. Big caveat, not a lot has been detailed about what the reforms entail. Instead, much remains vague. But using the bits that are clear, the Tax Policy Centre has explored some possible impacts and the Times has visualised them.
I like the opening graphic, though all are informative, that cycles through various proposals. It highlights which group benefits most from the proposals. The quick takeaway is that while all would moderately benefit, the rich do really well.
Credit for the piece goes to Ernie Tedeschi.
Yesterday Hurricane Ophelia hit Ireland and the United Kingdom. Yes, the two islands get hit with ferocious storms from time to time, but rarely do they enjoy the hurricanes like we do on the eastern seaboards of Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
Earlier this hurricane season the US had to deal with Harvey, Irma, and Maria. And in early October the Wall Street Journal published a piece that looked at the economic impact of the former two hurricanes as exhibited in economic data.
Overall the piece does a nice job explaining how hurricanes impact different sectors of the economy, well, differently. And wouldn’t you know it that leisure and hospitality is the hardest hit? But then they put together this stacked bar chart showing the impact of the hurricanes on both Florida/Georgia and Texas for Irma and Harvey, respectively.
The problem is that the stacked bar chart does not allow us to examine each hurricane as a specific data set. Because the Harvey data set is first, we have the common baseline and can compare the lengths of the magenta-ish bars. But what about the blue sets for Irma? How large is natural resources and mining compared to professional and business services? It is incredibly difficult to tell because neither bar starts at the same point. You must mentally move the bars to the same baseline and then hope your brain can accurately capture the length.
Instead, a split bar chart with each sector having two bars would have been preferable. Or, barring that, two plots under the same title. Then you could even sort the data sets and make it even easier to see which sectors were more important in the impacted areas.
Stacked bar charts work when you are trying to show total magnitude and the breakdowns are incidental to the point. But as soon as the comparison of the breakdowns becomes important, it’s time to make another chart.
Credit for the piece goes to Andrew Van Dam.
Last week I covered a lot of Red Sox data. And your feedback has been fantastic. I think you can look forward to more visualisation of sportsball data. But since this is not a sports blog, let us dive back into some other topics. Like today’s piece on economic growth.
It comes from the Economist and explores the development history of national economies relative to that of the United States. The point of the chart was to illustrate what the researchers determined was the middle income trap, a space in which countries develop and become semi-rich, but then can never quite escape.
The Economist makes the point that the definition of middle income matters. The range is enormous and one statistic says that it could take 48 years to graduate at a healthy rate of economic growth. I wonder is this bit, however, could also have been charted. The show don’t tell mantra works well here for setting up the problem, but a chart or two showing that exact range could have supplemented the text and perhaps made it more digestible.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.
This week I covered a lot of Red Sox stuff. (And I received some great feedback from people, so maybe more baseball-related stats things will be forthcoming.) But, since it is Friday, I wanted to keep today late. So over breakfast I worked on a flowchart to help you choose whom to root for in the playoffs now that Boston, Colorado, Arizona, Minnesota, Washington, and Cleveland have all been eliminated.
To be fair, my second choice was good old Terry Francona and the Indians (like last year). But, the Evil Empire is returning.
Happy Friday, all.
Following on yesterday’s post about the Red Sox offence, I wanted to follow up and look into their power numbers. So here we have a smaller scale graphic. Nothing too fancy, but the data backs what my eyes saw all year. A definite power drain up and down the Red Sox lineup in 2017.
Like I said yesterday, the Red Sox season is over. And the coverage on offseason needs began in the morning papers. But I wanted to follow up on the data from yesterday and delve a bit more deeply into the offence.
Yes, we know it was roughly league average across the team. And we know it took a hit with David Ortiz’s retirement at the end of last year. But what happened? Well, I took those same OPS+ numbers for the starting nine and compared 2017 to 2016. I then looked further back to see how those same players performed throughout their careers (admittedly I skipped Hanley Ramirez’s 2 plate appearances in 2005.)
You should take a look at the full graphic, but the short version, pretty much everyone had an off year. And when everyone has an off year, it is a pretty safe bet the team will have an off year.
Well the 2017 season ended yesterday afternoon for my Boston Red Sox as we lost 5–4 to the Houston Astros and they took Game 4 of the ALDS. So this morning we will surely see the critiques and hot takes on what to do to improve the team begin to make the internet rounds.
But before we get into all of that, I wanted to take a look at the 2017 season from a data perspective. At least, the regular season. After all, we can see how Sale in Game 1 and Kimbrel in Game 4 just had poorly timed bad days. But what about the other 162 games? After all, we will need to win a lot of them if we want to make it back to the playoffs in 2018.
I just pulled a couple quick stats from Baseball Reference. Now we can quibble about which stats are best another time, but from my experience the more sabremetric datapoints are lost on a general audience. So here we are using OPS, basically a hitter’s average combined with his power/slugging ability, and ERA, the amount of runs a pitcher can be expected to allow every nine innings. I also threw in defensive runs saved above average, i.e. is the player saving more runs than an average player.
You can read the graphic for the details, but the takeaway is that Boston, we need not panic. The 2017 Red Sox were a good team. Far from perfect—here is looking at you lack of middle-of-the-order power—but a solid lineup, good rotation, good defence, and a fantastic bullpen. How can we add without subtracting too much?
Well news definitely happened whilst your author was on holiday. So today we look at an informative piece from the New York Times that compares the weapons fire from the Las Vegas shooting to that of Orlando and a fully automatic weapon.
This piece makes good use of both audio and motion graphics to show how the bump stock makes a semi-automatic rifle more like what we might call a machine gun. It also includes some nice illustrations that demonstrate how the stock does what it does.
From an audio standpoint, I do want to point out that the designers made a wise decision in opting not to use authentic sounds. Instead they chose an abstracted sound, allowing the user to focus on the rapidity and steadiness of the sound.
Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Adam Pearce, Karen Yourish, C.J. Chivers, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff.
I rarely watch American football. But I do like charts about it. So today’s post looks at a piece from Benjamin Morris who explored the scenarios in which a team should opt for the two-point conversion. For those of you who know even less about American football, you can attempt such a conversion after your team scores a touchdown. More often than not your team will go for the far safer and more assured one-point conversion, which if made makes a touchdown of seven points.
It turns out that teams should probably be looking for those two points a wee bit more often than they presently do. And to help teams figure that out, Morris made a small multiple chart looking at many different scenarios.
Credit for the piece goes to Benjamin Morris.
