Author: Brendan Barry

  • The Midterms Are Not Over

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Your author is back after a few days out sick and then the Armistice Day holiday. But guess what? The elections are not yet all over. Instead, there are a handful of races to call. Below is a screenshot from a FiveThirtyEight article tracking those races still too close to call. Why are there races?…

  • Election Day

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    The 2018 midterm elections are finally here. Thankfully for political nerds like myself, the New York Times homepage had a link to a guide of when what polls close (as early as 18.00 Eastern). It makes use of small multiples to show when states close and then afterwards which states have closed and which remain…

  • Congressional District Population Density

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Tomorrow is Election Day here in the United States and this morning I wanted to look at a piece I’ve had in mind on doing from City Lab. I held off because it looks at the election and what better time to do it than right before the election. Specifically, the article looks at the…

  • Midterm Challengers

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    Brendan Barry
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    My initial plan for today was that I was not going to run anything light-hearted and focus instead on next week’s elections. But I still love xkcd so I checked that out and…well, here we go. At the broadest view, much is unintelligible on the map. But, you can see a lot of blue, or…

  • Where People Vote

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Voting is not compulsory in the United States. Consequently a big part of the strategy for winning is increasing your voters’ turnout and decreasing that of your opponent. In other words, demotivate your opponent’s supporters whilst simultaneously motivating your own base. But what does that baseline turnout map look like? Well, thankfully the Washington Post created…

  • Pages of Polls and Forecasts

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    We are now one week away from the midterm elections here in the United States. Surprisingly, we are going to be looking at election-y things over the course of the next week or so. But before we delve into that, I wanted to focus on the homepage for FiveThirtyEight, the below screenshot is from my…

  • 119 Wins

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    Brendan Barry
    in , ,

    The only number you need today, the only factette you need to see today, is this. Well done, Boston. Well done.

  • Government Officials Using Private Devices

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Earlier this week the news broke that President Trump refuses to use his government-issued iPhone for all his communications and prefers his private, unsecured device. This of course means, and reports indicate is happening, that Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies can listen in on his calls. So how about those private e-mail servers? Happy Friday,…

  • #MeToo After One Year

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    One year on and the #meToo movement continues to upend the political, economic, and cultural landscape of the United States. And a few days ago the New York Times published a piece on all the stories they have collected. From a data visualisation standpoint, this is a fairly simple piece. It takes 201 men (and…

  • The Saudi Assassination Squad

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    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?…