Author: Brendan Barry

  • Flowing Lava and Layers

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    Brendan Barry
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    I didn’t have the internet yesterday morning, so apologies for no posting. But at least it was back by the afternoon. Unlike utilities in La Palma, where a volcano has been erupting and lava flowing, covering parts of the island. The BBC had a brief article last week detailing the spread of the lava, which…

  • An Animated Approach to Understanding Vaccines…

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    Brendan Barry
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    …courtesy of Family Guy. In the last 18 months of looking at the data behind Covid-19 and the vaccines, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people, maybe even some of you, about the pandemic and the vaccines we’re using to combat it. Unfortunately, I’m just one person. Seth MacFarlane, however, has himself and the…

  • Covid Update: 22 September

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s been a little over a week now since my last update on Covid-19 in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. So where do we stand now, especially since last week we had seen a split with some good news and some not so good news? Well let’s start with where we had good…

  • Updated DNA Ethnicity Estimates

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier this year I posted a short piece that compared my DNA ethnicity estimates provided by a few different companies to each other. Ethnicity estimates are great cocktail party conversations, but not terribly useful to people doing serious genealogy research. They are highly dependent upon the available data from reference populations. To put it another…

  • Misleading Graphics Aren’t Limited to US Elections

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week I wrote about how CBS News’ coverage of the California recall election featured a misleading graphic. In particular, the graphic created the appearance that the results were closer than they really were. This week we had another election and, sadly, I find that I have to write the same sort of piece again.…

  • Update on Tiffany

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last month on another Friday I shared some graphics from a video by CCP Grey that looked at the origin and history of the name Tiffany. It’s a great video and I highly recommend it. But last week he published…an addendum I guess you could call it. The piece takes a look at a research…

  • Correcting CBS News Charts

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    Brendan Barry
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    One of the long-running critiques of Fox News Channel’s on air graphics is that they often distort the truth. They choose questionable if not flat-out misleading baselines, scales, and adjust other elements to create differences where they don’t exist or smooth out problematic issues. But yesterday a friend sent me a graphic that shows Fox…

  • Fixing Where 9/11 Happened

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today we have a quick piece, but one that I read at the weekend, you know, the 9/11 20th anniversary one. The article served as a quick summary of the day for those who either don’t know or don’t remember. After 20 years, there are a lot of people who have come of age in…

  • Covid Update: 13 September

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s been a little less than a week since our last Covid-19 update for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. At the time we had just come back from the Labour Day holiday here in the United States and that left us with two big questions. First, what would the data show after we…

  • Mapping the Mullica Hill Tornado

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    Brendan Barry
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    When the remnants of Hurricane Ida rolled through the Northeast two weeks ago, here in the Philadelphia region we saw catastrophic flooding from deluges west of the city and to the east we had a tornado outbreak in South Jersey. At a simplistic level we can attribute the differences in outcomes to the path of…