Brendan Barry – Page 80

Bump Stocks and Automatic Weapons

Well news definitely happened whilst your author was on holiday. So today we look at an informative piece from the New York Times that compares the weapons fire from the Las Vegas shooting to that of Orlando and a fully automatic weapon.

This piece makes good use of both audio and motion graphics to show how the bump stock makes a semi-automatic rifle more like what we might call a machine gun. It also includes some nice illustrations that demonstrate how the stock does what it does.

From an audio standpoint, I do want to point out that the designers made a wise decision in opting not to use authentic sounds. Instead they chose an abstracted sound, allowing the user to focus on the rapidity and steadiness of the sound.

Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Adam Pearce, Karen Yourish, C.J. Chivers, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff.

2-point Conversions

I rarely watch American football. But I do like charts about it. So today’s post looks at a piece from Benjamin Morris who explored the scenarios in which a team should opt for the two-point conversion. For those of you who know even less about American football, you can attempt such a conversion after your team scores a touchdown. More often than not your team will go for the far safer and more assured one-point conversion, which if made makes a touchdown of seven points.

It turns out that teams should probably be looking for those two points a wee bit more often than they presently do. And to help teams figure that out, Morris made a small multiple chart looking at many different scenarios.

Credit for the piece goes to Benjamin Morris.

Arctic Sea Ice Levels Continue to Decline

You may recall how over two years ago I posted about a piece from the New York Times that explored the levels of Arctic sea ice. It showed how the winter sea ice of 2015 was the lowest level ever recorded. Well last week the Times updated that piece with new data. And instead of the static graphic we enjoyed last time around, this time the piece began with a nice animation. It really helps you see the pattern, so you should click through and check out the whole piece.

Go hit play and you'll see the trend — Go hit play and you’ll see the trend

But this isn’t just a visually top heavy piece. No, the remainder of the article continues to explore the state of Arctic sea ice through a number of other charts and maps.

Credit for the piece goes to Nadja Popovich, Henry Fountain, and Adam Pearce.

Earthquake Early Warning

Last month, two massive earthquakes devastated Mexico. Now, if you were like me, you were captivated by the photos and videos of the quakes striking and tearing down buildings and infrastructure. But, think about it for a second, how did people know to take out their mobiles and record the tremors for posterity’s sake?

Well, the first thing you should know is that earthquakes consist of a number of different waves of energy. Some move quicker and are less damaging than the slower travelling ones. And it turns out that scientists have been able to use that speed differential to build early warning systems along and around fault lines.

The Washington Post did a really nice job of explaining how earthquake-prone California is developing just such a system to deal with its tremors. I won’t spoil all the details, you should go read the article if earthquakes are of any interest to you.

Credit for the piece goes to

Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight

I had dinner with an old friend earlier this week and in the course of our conversation we discussed the bans of knives and guns from hospitals. That reminded me of this xkcd comic from last week.

Though a lid could be used as a shield in a knife fight…

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

How Serious Is the Rise in Violent Crime?

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department released figures for violent crimes in 2016. The administration talked about the rise in violent crime. And yes, such crime did rise in 2016. But, what was not raised nearly as much is that we are also living in an era of historically low crime. FiveThirtyEight broke down the crime numbers through a series of charts and put them in their historical context.

The screenshot below looks just at murder rates. And again, nobody denies that the murder rate is up. But it still below the level it was in the 2000s, 1990s, and 1980s. One has to go back to the 1960s to find murder rates so low.

Murder is up, but still historically low

The point is really just to reiterate that context matters. If we were to look at the rise over the last year, yes an increase from 4.9 to 5.3 would look bad. But, really, we are still living in a far safer country than we were for most of the latter half of the 20th century. You just need to extend the endpoints of the chart to see it.

Credit for the piece goes to Jeff Asher.

How Bad is the Rohingya Crisis?

Pretty bad.

Less than a week after posting about the satellite views showing entire villages razed to the ground, we have a piece from the Economist looking at refugee outflows. And they are worse than the outflow of refugees during the Rwandan genocide back in 1994.

To be clear, they are not saying that nearly a million people have been killed—though there is quite a bit of evidence to say the Burmese security forces are cleansing the state of Rakhine of one of its primary ethnic groups.

But when it comes to the chart, I am not quite sure what I feel about it. It uses both the x and y axis to show the impact of the refugee outflow. But the problem is that we are generally rubbish at comparing areas. Compounding that, we have the total number of refugees represented by circles, another notorious way of displaying areas. (Often people will confuse the circle’s area with its radius or diameter and get the scale wrong.)

I wonder, would a more straight forward display that broke the dataset into two charts would be clearer? What if the designers had kept the Marimekko-like outflow display, but represented each crisis and its total outflow as a straight bar chart to the right of the timeline? (I do think the timeline is particularly good context, especially since it highlights the earlier persecution of the Rohingya.)

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.

(Lack of) Support for Cassidy-Graham Obamacare Repeal

A wee bit of housekeeping here at the top. Your author will be away for work and then enjoying a well-earned, but all-too-brief holiday over the next week.

At the end of the week, the Senate’s window to pass a budget reconciliation measure, i.e. what they need to do to repeal Obamacare with only 51 votes, will close for a year. As of my writing on Monday evening, Susan Collins has just become the third Republican no vote, effectively dooming the bill should it come to the floor for the vote.

But as the week progresses, I fully expect the bill’s authors to add some bells and whistles to try and sweeten the deal. But the problem has always been, the bells for the hardline conservatives push moderates away and the whistles for those same moderates drive away the same hardline conservatives. For the next year and a half or so, the best bet to pass a fix to healthcare is a bipartisan “repair Obamacare” instead of “repeal Obamacare”. Whether or not the Senate will have the stomach for such a compromise is yet to be seen.

In the meantime, this week we have a tracker from the Washington Post examining the latest positions of senators on the Cassidy-Graham bill.

It does a nice job of breaking up the Republican conference not just along the ideological spectrum, but also on the winners and losers spectrum. After all, the bill as written will transfer large sums of aid from states that accepted the expansion of Medicare to those states that rejected expansion.

Who's saying yes and who's saying no — Who’s saying yes and who’s saying no

Credit for the piece goes to Kim Soffen, Amber Phillips, and Kevin Schaul.

German Election Results

On Sunday Germany went to the polls. Angela Merkel won a fourth term, but the anti-immigrant nationalist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), won nearly 13% of the vote. That places a nationalist party in the German parliament for the first time since World War II.

A lot of the graphics I saw were straight-up bar charts of the final vote share. But Die Welt, a German paper, did have this piece with an interactive choropleth. There is nothing revolutionary in the map itself. But it does show how support for the AfD exhibits clear geographic patterns, namely large support in what was East Germany.

AfD support was strongest in the former East Germany

But the really nice part about the Die Welt piece is the interactive coalition builder at the end. They present several different possibilities. Unfortunately, I cannot read German, so the narrative on the page eludes me. But it was fun to explore the potentials. But with the SPD announcing it would go into opposition, we are not likely to see a grand coalition.

Credit for the piece goes to the Die Welt graphics department.

Nambia

C’mon. You knew I was not going to let that one slip by.

President Trump, in a meeting with African leaders, twice name-dropped Nambia and in one mention held it up as having a nearly self-sufficient healthcare system. Funny thing to mention as the US is on the brink of eviscerating its healthcare system. But I digress. The point is that when you are speaking to the president of a country, you take a minute to learn how to pronounce the country’s name correctly. Even write it phonetically in the text if you have to. (I’ve done that.) So where is Nambia?