Happy Friday, all. I like a good mulled cider in winter. And I made one about a week ago. And that is about the only real connection to this graphic from xkcd.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Apples to Apples
Tag: infographic
Mapping the Country’s Brain Drain
Alternatively known as the zombie food map. Sorry, but I couldn’t resist that one. Today we look at a piece from Bloomberg that maps brain drain across the country. What is brain drain? Basically it is the exodus of people with advanced degrees and education employed in science-y industries and fields. So this map shows us where the brains are moving from and where they are moving to.
Credit for the piece goes to Vincent Del Giudice and Wei Lu.
Escaping—or Not—from the Oakland Fire
A few weeks back a fire raged through a communal, creative warehouse in Oakland. The fire claimed the lives of over thirty people. But why? We have the New York Times behind this piece which attempts to explain just what happened that night through a nice mixture of diagrammatic illustrations and photography.
Credit for the piece goes to Ford Fessenden and Anjali Singhvi.
Income Inequality
On the lighter side of things we have today’s post on income inequality. Always a lighter subject, no? Thanks to Jonathan Fairman for the link.
Herwig Scherabon designed the Atlas of Gentrification as a project at the Glasgow School of Art and it was picked up by Creative Review. It displays income as height and so creates a new cityscape of skyscrapers for the wealthy and leaves lower income residents looking straight up. His work covered the US cities of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The image below is of Chicago. I probably was living in a cluster of mid-rise buildings despite living in a five-story building.
Credit for the piece goes to Herwig Scherabon.
Populism Marches on in Europe
By just a hair under 20 percentage points, Italian voters—with a 70% turnout rate—voted down the reform package of soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. While the election was focused narrowly on a set of political reforms for Italian government, e.g. reducing the number of senators, the vote was unofficially seen by many as a test of the strength of anti-establishment populists in Europe. Note wins by such groups in Brexit and Donald Trump. In Europe this is a particularly important barometer reading because of 2017 elections in the Netherlands, France, and then Germany.
I had been looking for some online results trackers, in English, last night but found little. There was, however, this page from Bloomberg. The key thing for me is the link between the regions on the map and the section on the bar chart.
Credit for the piece goes to Bloomberg’s graphics department.
Great Britain by an American
I am forever an Anglophile.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
The David Petraeus Clusterfuck
This is sort of an early Friday post that follows up from my post on David Petraeus yesterday. Today’s comes from Hilary Sargent, once of the Boston Globe. It diagrams the network that ultimately resulted in the conviction I mentioned yesterday.
For President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign to run so heavily against Secretary Clinton for mishandling classified information, his potential choice for Secretary of State did worse. He was actually convicted of mishandling classified information.
Credit for the piece goes to Hilary Sargent.
David Petraeus for Secretary of State—No
I am very closely following the transition of power from President Obama to President-elect Trump. And one of the very surprising news stories has been that Trump is considering David Petraeus for Secretary of State.
Given the controversy and campaign rhetoric against and surrounding Hillary Clinton for alleged mishandling of classified information as Secretary of State, I wanted to set the record straight with this one dataset comparing Petraeus to Clinton on their reckless handling of classified information.
Going by the data, if your claim was that Hillary Clinton could not be trusted with national secrets, neither can David Petraeus. Move along, Mr. Trump.
Credit for the piece goes to me.
Diversity in America
Today’s post is a choropleth map from the Washington Post examining diversity in the United States and how fast or slow diversity is expanding. Normally with two variables one goes instantly to the scatter plot. But here the Post explored the two variables geographically. And it holds up.
The colours are perhaps the only part holding me up on the piece’s design. Are blue and yellow the best two colours to represent level of diversity and growth? I lose some of the gradation in the yellows, especially between the big increases in diversity. Can I offer a better solution? No, and maybe there is not. But I would love the chance to explore different palette options.
As you well know, I am not a big fan of always plotting things on maps. I call them the silver bullet. However, in this instance, there are clear geographic patterns to the four different scenarios. Of course this soon after the election I would love adding a third variable: how the counties voted in the presidential election. Maybe next time.
Credit for the piece goes to Dan Keating and Laris Karklis.
Trump’s Potential Conflicts of Interest
President-elect Donald Trump was correct when he stated that the president is often exempt from conflicts of interest while in office. However, he is not exempt from the emolument clause of the Constitution. Put simply, the president cannot receive money or gifts from foreign governments. The whole not being beholden to a foreign power thing.
The catch is that a significant bit of Trump’s portfolio involves dealings with state-run companies across the world. And state-run companies are state-run, that is to say, run by foreign governments. Should they pay rent, make an investment, offer him a gift, he would be receiving money or gifts from a foreign government. Unless Trump takes action between now and January to sell-off or otherwise divest himself of those investments and arrangements, on Inaugural Day, not only would he be swearing the oath of office, but he would be breaking it simultaneously.
The New York Times went through Trump’s own financial disclosure and found these locations around the world where his business operates.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard C. Paddock, Eric Lipton, Ellen Barry, Rod Nordland, Danny Hakim, and Simon Romero.