Author: Brendan Barry

  • How We Die

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s Friday, so what better and more uplifting way is there to enter the weekend than looking at the most distinctive ways people die in the United States. The piece comes from Bloomberg. Credit for the piece goes to Danielle Burger.

  • Words on the Orlando Shootings

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday I looked at the coverage of the Orlando shooting. Today I want to look at a really nice piece from the Washington Post on the political reaction to the shooting. The Post collected the reactions and official statements of Congress, over 500 representatives and senators. They performed some analysis of the words and then…

  • Coverage of the Orlando Shootings

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last Monday I stated that I would attempt a longer piece on the graphics explaining the shootings in Orlando. Since I do not have access to the print versions, I am examining only the digital versions here. Go grab a cup of tea, because this is certainly one of my longer pieces. One of the most common…

  • Philadelphia’s Obesity Problem

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week Philadelphia became the first large US city to introduce a soda tax. (Berkeley introduced one a few years ago, but is 1/10 the size of Philly.) The Guardian has a really nice write-up on how the tax was sold not on health benefits, but of civic benefits to the education system. But the…

  • Predicting the Electoral College

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    Brendan Barry
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    Well the Democratic DC primaries were last Tuesday and Hillary Clinton won. So now we start looking ahead towards the July conventions and then the November elections. Consequently, if a day is an eternity in politics we have many lifespans to witness before November. But that does not mean we cannot start playing around with…

  • Productive Fridays

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    Brendan Barry
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    Funny story, a virus hit my workplace this week. And it basically cost us four days of work because nobody could actually access their work files. That made me remember this recent piece from xkcd, which is so very apropos at the end of this week. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Contextual Scatter Plots

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    Brendan Barry
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    I know I mentioned that I would review the coverage of the Orlando shootings this week in more depth than I did on Monday. But, allow me an interruption for a nice little piece that I wanted to get to last week. If anything, it’s far less serious. My apologies for my focus of late…

  • Not All Charts Are Necessary Part 2

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    Brendan Barry
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    Monday I examined a chart from the BBC that in my mind needlessly added confusing visual components to what could have been a straight table. So here we take a look at some other options that could have been used to tell the same story. The first is the straight forward table approach. Here I…

  • Tables of Insight

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday I opined about how simple tables can convey meaningful information without the aid of unnecessary chart elements. And while we will get back to that post, I did want to take a moment to share an older piece from the New York Times I recalled and that has been updated since Orlando. The piece…

  • Not All Charts Are Necessary

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    Brendan Barry
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    I will be trying to do a longer piece on the data visualisations surrounding the shootings in Orlando later this week. But for starters, a simple point through this piece from the BBC—not that they are the only culprits of this. Not all data-driven stories need visualisations. Sometimes a nicely typeset table will do the…