As I have been blogging the past several days, today the Supreme Court will announce its rulings on the two gay marriage cases. But, I have already looked at that twicenow. Today I want to look at the results of the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate, necessitated by John Kerry resigning from the seat to become Secretary of State.
This work comes from the Huffington Post. It offers the usual map fare with towns coloured by the victor and tinted by the share of the vote. Though do note the interesting—is this novel?—means of filling in the town with colour to represent the percent of the town reporting. My screenshot is a bit late, but check out Warren near Springfield or Boston and Cambridge—a bit harder to see because of their size and shape.
Looking across the state for the results
However, the fascinating thing is the use of the small multiples of scatter plots to look at historic elections. The designers included a small key in the upper-right explaining that dots above the line represent towns where Ed Markey, the Democrat who won, outperformed the historic Democrat. I have not seen anybody attempt to portray the data in this fashion before.
Using a scatter plot to chart the results
Credit for the piece goes to Aaron Bycoffe and Jay Boice.
Last Thursday we looked at the impact of potential outcomes by an expected Supreme Court ruling on two gar marriage cases. (We’re still waiting, probably until this Thursday, though it could be today.) Today, we look at the impact of potential outcomes of another big case before the Court, the Voting Rights Act. Broadly (and quickly), Shelby County, Alabama is challenging the federal government, which according to the act, must approve any changes to electoral law in those places that have had problems in their history of disenfranchising black citizens (and more recently non-English speaking citizens, i.e. Hispanics). The act was renewed for 25 years by President Bush back in 2006.
The New York Times explains through interactive maps first the geographic scope of this federal approval. As one might expect, it significantly impacts southern states. But the rules used to determine that coverage are decades old.
Current coverage
But if the current process must change, several different metrics by which alternative coverage could be determined would offer different coverage. The New York Times allows user to see those different metrics, and then adjust filters to fine tune those areas covered. A nice feature for all of these views is the ability to show/hide those areas under the current coverage.
Using prejudice to define coverage
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
Today’s piece comes from Bloomberg and looks at the cost of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic. And when I write cost, I mean just that. While the lives lost are the most significant, Bloomberg’s article states that shootings cost Chicago $2.5 billion per year, or $2,500 per household. They supplemented their article with an infographic detailing and breaking down these costs by focusing on the South Shore in the city’s south side.
The cost of Chicago's gun violence on the South Shore
Credit for the piece goes to Chloe Whiteaker, John McCormick, and Tim Jones.
This choropleth map comes from Deadspin and it looks at each state’s highest paid public employee. As you can probably imagine since the graphic comes from Deadspin, most states pay their highest wages to sports coaches. Ten states pay somebody other than a sports coach. And five of those are in the Mid-Atlantic/New England area.
Of 2048. Well, kind of. Lately the country has been talking a lot about immigration and its impacts because of this bipartisan desire to achieve some kind of result on an immigration bill working its way through the Senate. One of the common thoughts is that if we legalise a whole bunch of illegals or document most of the undocumented (I’ll leave the language for you to decide), the new American citizens will overwhelmingly vote Democratic and there goes the Republic(an Party).
Nate Silver—yes, that Nate Silver who accurately predicted the presidential results and a whole bunch of other stuff too—looked at a more complex and more nuanced set of demographic variables and found that the aforementioned argument greatly oversimplifies the results. The problem is not entirely the entry of newly documented or illegal workers. Instead, there are systemic demographic issues.
So here comes the New York Times with an excellent data explorer and forecast modeller. You can set the year to examine and then set the results of the immigration debate with how many immigrants are made legal/documented and then how many of them vote. After that you can begin to adjust population growth, voting patterns, &c. to see how those affect the elections. (The obvious caveats of acts of god, party platforms, candidates, &c. all hold.)
2048 Results
The fascinating bit is that if you keep the demographic patterns as they are currently, adjusting the immigration factors at the outset have very little impact on the results. The country is moving towards the current Democratic platform. Even if 0% of the undocumented/illegal immigrants become documented/legal, and if 0% of 0% vote, the result is still a landslide for the Democrats. The real changes begin to happen if you adjust the population growth rates of the legal/documented citizens and voters. But those patterns/behaviours are a lot more difficult to adjust since you can’t legislate people to have more babies.
All in all a fascinating piece from the New York Times. The controls are fairly intuitive, drag sliders to adjust percentages. The sliders have clear labels. And the results on the map are instantaneous. Perhaps the only quirk is that the ranges of the colours are not detailed. But that might be a function of forecasting the data so far into the future and having growing ranges of certainty.
Credit for the piece goes to Matthew Bloch, Josh Keller, and Nate Silver.
Today I have more immigration-related information graphics and data visualisation for you. Earlier this week the New York Times looked at immigration to California, but this time the focus was on Asian population growth and not Hispanic. The graphic here supports an article looking at where the growth has been focused in California. And given that emphasis, the map accompanying the article makes sense. And as the reader can clearly see, much of that growth has been centred in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County.
Following on last week’s posts onimmigration comes today’s post on how that might impact Republican politics. Well I say might but pretty much mean definitely. The graphic comes from the Wall Street Journal and it takes a look at the demographic makeup of states, House congressional districts and then survey data on immigration broken into Republicans vs. Democrats.
The GOP's Tricky Terrain
I think the piece is a good start, but at the end of the introductory paragraph is the most salient point about the piece. And unfortunately the graphic does not wholly embody that part. Of course within limited time and with limited resources, achieving that sort of completeness is not always possible. That said I think overall the piece is successful, it just lacks that finishing graphical point.
Credit for the piece goes to Dante Chinni and Randy Yeip.
Keeping with maps, they can be useful, but all too often people fall back upon them because it is a quick and easy way of displaying data for geographic entities. This graphic from the New York Times on ADHD is not terribly complex, but it uses a map effectively.
The article discusses how ADHD rates among states vary, but are still higher in the South. The map supports that argument. Consider how it would be different if every other state were darkened to a different shade of purple. There would be neither rhyme nor reason as to why the map was being used.
A map well done
A subtle point worth noting is that only the states falling into the highest bin are labelled. Those are the states that best support the story. The remainder of the states are left unlabelled so as not to distract from the overall piece.
Today’s map comes from the Texas Tribune out of Austin, Texas. The map displays the location of disposal wells, i.e. the sites where the waste water from fracking and related drilling operations are dumped. Firstly, the map hints that the fracking industry is not spread equally across the state.
But secondly, the map does this through the use of hexagons that represent well density. So at a broad, state-wide view, the user sees almost a traditional choropleth. The difference is that these are not natural or political boundaries but rather data constructs designed to aggregate highly granular data points.
Well locations state-wide are aggregated into coloured hexagons
Even nicer, however, is that if you want to see where disposal wells are in your county or town, the map lets you do that too. Because as you zoom in ever closer, the individual wells appear within the hexagons that they colour. It’s a very solid piece of work.
Individual wells colour the hexagons, but are only visible up close
Today’s post comes via my coworker Jonathan and his subscription to National Geographic. The spread below looks at the gap in life expectancy between men and women in the United States. Outliers are highlighted by drawing lines to the counties in question while the same colour scale is used on a smaller map to look at historic data. And of course for those concerned about how the US places amongst its piers on the international stage, a small selection of countries are presented beneath in a dot plot that looks at the differences and averages.
The National Geographic spreadA detail of the choropleth mapA closer look at the dot plot
