Brendan Barry – Page 60

The Saudi Assassination Squad

Yesterday we looked at the importance of arms deals from the US and UK to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the brutal murder and assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who sometimes wrote critically of the Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) regime. But what about the actual murder itself? What do we know?

Well at some point today, President Erdogan of Turkey will give a speech, just prior to the opening of the big Saudi conference the Saudis have branded the Davos of the Desert. In Erdogan’s speech, he is expected to reveal even more of the details of the murder as collected by Turkish intelligence services. But as this story has been unfolding, the Washington Post has been collecting the details about the alleged 15-person assassination squad.

The entire piece is worth reading. It provides great detail and walks the reader through how the story was pieced together. And relevant to my blog it makes use of some nice data visualisation and design elements, including this graphic.

A few too many coincidences in this story…

It captures some of the arrivals and departures of six of the men identified. The graphic also notes that sometimes people will not be documented because they arrive on diplomatic flights instead of commercial flights.

As for the rest, the Post used photographic evidence to show how one of the individuals was likely a bodyguard or in the security services for MBS. Phone records and the photographic records of Turkish border control were also used. Taken together, it paints a damning portrait of the supposedly modernising MBS regime.

Of course now we can only wait to see what Erdogan has to say this morning.

Credit for the piece goes to Aaron C. Davis, Aaron Williams and Jason Bernert.

Arms Sales for Saudi Arabia and Head Removals for Journalists

Yeah, guess where I am going with that title…

If you have been living under a rock, Saudi Arabia barbarically murdered/assassinated a Washington Post journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey about three weeks ago. The journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was a Saudi citizen and US resident living around Washington from where he reported on the new Saudi government under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

There is a lot to unpack in the story, but the key points are that Saudi Arabia has, for weeks, disputed the idea that his fingers were severed, then beheaded, body dismembered, and corpse disposed of within their consulate in Istanbul. Only yesterday did they begrudgingly admit that it was a “rogue” operation that involved some of the closest advisors/bodyguards to MBS. (We will look at that later.) How do we know all this? Basically, every time Saudi Arabia denies something, the Turks let leak evidence proving them wrong.

So while the story will continue to develop, what is the potential cost for Saudi Arabia? Well, according to President Trump, not arms sales. Although this morning Germany announced it was temporarily halting all exports to the Saudi kingdom. But the two of the largest providers of weapons to Saudi Arabia are the United States and the United Kingdom. And that is how we get to today’s chart. The question is what, if any, action will these two countries take against Saudi Arabia?

Will these line trend down anytime soon?

It’s a line chart from the Washington Post. There really isn’t much to say in its design. However, what I found interesting is the unit of measure. We might expect dollars, pounds, or euros, but instead we get TIV, or trend indicator values. It’s a unit devised by the data provider to allow a common measurement, presumably so that we can do just this: compare two different countries’ arms sales.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

Phone Calls

It’s Friday, everybody, and that means we all made it to the end of the week.

As a millennial, I was surprised to learn that my mobile can actually be used to make telephonic calls. Phone calls, as they are often known, are like direct messages or text messages, but made without cat gifs or memes. And your voice cannot be filtered. It seems a #primitive way of communicating.

But thanks to xkcd, we can see how, using one person as a sample, the types of these phone calls have varied over the years.

Scammers, politicians, and family, oh my.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

The New Longest Flight

You might recall that back in March I wrote about the use of spherical maps to show great circles. This helps illustrate the actual routes that aircraft take in flight. (Yes, actual flight plans deviate based on routes, weather, traffic, &c.) At the time I wrote about how there was a soon-to-be Singapore–New York route. Ta da.

That's just a long time in one aircraft. — That’s just a long time in one aircraft.

Nothing fancy here in this graphic from the Economist. It probably is just a reuse of the original but with the additional routes removed. But, I still love these kinds of maps. From a design manager standpoint, in a way this is great efficiency in that an element from a graphic made once can now, with minimal effort, be used in a second piece. And not in a meaningless, throw-in way, but this graphic does very much help to illustrate the actual route and long across the globe it travels.

In a second note, not related to the graphic itself, I want to point out a subtle change made by the Economist. This is the first online graphic to use an updated chrome, which is the branding elements that surround the actual content of the piece.

The biggest change is a new or modified typeface for the graphic header. I have not seen anything about design changes at the Economist, but I will look into it. But the changes are, again, subtle. The best example in these two comparisons (new on the left, old on the right) is the shape of the letter e.

You can see how the terminal, or the part of the letter hooking and swinging out at the bottom, used to come to an end at an angle. Now it ends with a vertical chop. I haven’t looked too extensively at the typeface, but given the letter e, it appears to be a little bit wider of a face.

The other change, not quite as subtle, is the positioning of the iconic red rectangle around which so much of the Economist’s brand hangs. Bringing back the above graphic, you can see where I drew a black line to indicate the edge of the original graphic.

Slight changes

The box is now orientated horizontally (again, new is on the left), which actually brings it closer to the actual Economist logo. But, and probably more importantly, it allows the graphic’s edge to go to the, well, edge. And since their site uses generous whitespace around their graphics, they don’t necessarily need margins within the graphic.

They have also chosen to raise the level at which the header starts, i.e. there is less space between the red rule at the top of the graphic and the start of the words. This, however, appears to have been possible in the original design.

As more graphics roll out, I am going to be curious to see if there are other changes. Or even just to see how these subtle changes affect the rest of the graphics.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Mapping All the Buildings

I wish I had more for this post. Saturday morning’s New York Times was delivered with this on the front page, above the fold. It promised a special section including graphics that showed every building in the United States with a pullout poster of a large major city.

I have been through my Sunday paper twice now and cannot find the maps. So while I would love to see the full work, and then probably share a bit of it with all of you, I cannot. Instead, we can only look at the above. Even there though, you can begin to get a sense of the different types of spatial arrangements our cities exhibit.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

First Florence, Now Michael

You may recall a few weeks ago there was a hurricane named Florence that slammed into the Carolina before stalling and dumping voluminous amounts of rain that inundated inland communities in addition to the damage by the storm surge in the coastal communities. At the time I wrote about a New York Times piece that explored housing density in coastal areas, specifically around the Florence impact area.

Well today the New York Times has a print graphic about something similar. It uses the same colours and styles, but swaps in a different data set and then uses a small multiple setup to include the Florida Panhandle. Of course the Florida Panhandle was just struck by Hurricane Michael, a Category 4 storm when it made landfall.

Of course that track for Michael also brought significant rainfall to the areas recovering from Florence for a double whammy

This one instead looks at median income per zip code to highlight the disparity between those living directly on the coast and those inland. In these two most recent landfall areas, the reader can clearly see that the zip codes along the coast have far greater incomes and, by proxy, wealth than those just a few zip codes further inland.

The problem is that rebuilding lives, communities, and infrastructure not only takes time, but also money. And with lower incomes, some of the hardest hit areas over the past several weeks could have a very difficult time recovering.

Regardless, the recoveries on the continental mainlands of the Carolinas and Florida will likely be far quicker and more comprehensive than they have been thus far for Puerto Rico.

The only downside with this graphic is the registration shift, which is why the graphic appears fuzzy as colours are ever so slightly offset whereas the single ink black text in the upper right looks clear and crisp.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.

Europe is More than the Big States

First, I want to start with a housekeeping note. Your author will be travelling for work and then a short autumn holiday. And so while I may be able to sneak a post or two in, I generally would not expect anything until next Friday, 12 October.

But let’s end this string of posts with a map. It is a choropleth, so in one sense there is nothing crazy going on here. The map comes from the Economist, which published an article on life expectancy throughout Europe and the big takeaway is that it is lower in the east than the west.

Apparently life is pretty good in northern Spain

The great part of the map, however, is that we get to see a more granular level of detail. Usually we just get a view of the European states, which presents them as an even tone of one shade or one colour. Here we can see the variety of life expectancy in the UK, France, and Belgium, and then still compare that to eastern Europe.

Of course creating a map like this demands data to drive it. Do data sets exist for the sub-national geographic units of EU or European states? Sometimes not. And in those cases, if you need a map, the European state choropleth is the choice you have to make. I just hope that we get to see more data sets like this with more granular data to present a more complex and patterned map.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Calendars

Throughout recorded history, calendars have profoundly impacted the development of human society. They allowed us to mark the rain or flood seasons to prepare for planting or reaping crops along the banks of rivers like the Nile. Calendars allowed us to account for the seasons and create the mythologies around them. We also have calendars for lunar cycles and other celestial objects.

But the calendar looking to impact human history last week was this one:

But what was really happening on those dates…

That is the calendar of Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the US Supreme Court. First, I find it remarkable that someone kept a calendar from 1982. Secondly, we are using this to corroborate or prove false allegations of sexual assault by said nominee.

The New York Times had this on their front page of Thursday’s print edition. And it did a great job of focusing the reader’s attention on arguably the most important story of the day.

As some of you are probably aware, the Senate Judiciary Committee, who must first vote on a Supreme Court nominee, interviewed one of the accusers. Republicans were forced to admit she is credible enough of a witness that instead of being confirming Kavanaugh, he is now being reinvestigated to see if these allegations are true.

Credit for the piece goes to Brett Kavanaugh.

Millennials Are the Worst

Happy Friday, everybody. We made it to week’s end. But wouldn’t you know it? Millennials are still terrible. Admittedly this piece is over a year old, but I could not remember ever seeing it before.

If you do not recall, last year there was a debate about the spending habits of millennials and why they are not out there buying homes and properties. The point was that we waste our money on experiences like expensive coffees and, most specifically, avocado toast. So amidst all this, the BBC decided to look at how many pieces of avocado toast would be needed to purchase an apartment in 10 global cities. Neither Philadelphia nor Chicago were on that list, but New York is.

Note they even have local prices for avocado toast to make the index more accurate.

Ultimately, I have never had avocado toast. But it sounds pretty good. But I find it a stretch to think the reason I do not own a home is because I am trying to eat 12,135 slices of avocado toast.

Credit for the piece goes to Piero Zagami.

Running Up the Debt

I was reading the paper this morning and stumbled across this graphic in a New York Times article that focused on the increasing importance of debt payments.

Those interest payment lines are headed in the wrong direction.

The story is incredibly important and goes to show why the tax cuts passed by the administration are fiscally reckless. But the graphic is really smart too. After all, it is designed to work in a single colour.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.