So this is the last Friday before the election next Tuesday. Normally I reserve Fridays for less serious topics. And often xkcd does a great job covering that for me. But because of the election, I want today’s to be a bit more serious. Thankfully, we still have xkcd for that.
The screenshot above gets to the point. But the whole piece is worth a scroll-through and so it goes at the end. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
One of the things discussed during the election season—though very minorly compared to other things—is the national debt. Debt itself is not scary. Look at student loans, home loans, auto loans, &c. Look at the credit cards in your wallet. But running a country is far more difficult and complex than a household budget. That said, our national debt is high, though of late it has been trending in a positive direction, i.e. flattening out its growth curve.
So what would electing either Clinton or Trump do to the debt? Well, nothing great. According to this piece from the Washington Post, we would be talking about increasing the debt because of plans that are not fully funded or revenue cuts that fail to match spending cuts. But as the graphic shows with a really nice piece of layout between text and image, one option is far worse than the other for the issue of the national debt.
The opening graphic above draws the reader into the overall piece, but the remainder of the piece breaks down policies and implications with additional graphics. If you want to understand the differences between the candidates and the impact of those differences, this is a good read.
Credit for the piece goes to Kevin Uhrmacher and Jim Tankersley.
Again, the election is next week. And since I have moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, I now find myself in a contested state. This piece comes from the New York Times and explores the polling results across the blue-leaning-but-still-a-swing-state. I find it particularly interesting just how much red and purple there is in the suburban counties of Delaware, Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks all surrounding Philadelphia. But that will only make my vote matter more than it would have had were I still living in Chicago.
But you should also check out the piece for some updates on the Senate race we have going on here. The Republican Pat Toomey is running for re-election against the Democrat Katie McGinty. The race can be described as a tossup as the polls seem to be flipping back and forth. But there is some interesting polling data to be found in the article.
In about a week we will see just how Pennsylvania goes for both the presidential election and the Senate election.
Credit for the piece goes to Nate Cohn.
Well, everyone, today you get two posts. The first and earlier (and planned) post is about polling in Pennsylvania. Relevant to those of you following the US election. But today’s post is about what trains are running in the city of Philadelphia.
If you haven’t heard, the city’s mass transit agency, SEPTA, and its primary union for workers within the city cannot come to an agreement on a contract. So…strike. And for those of you reading this from outside the Philly area, rest assured it’s just chaos right now. To put it into a wee bit of perspective, we have this graphic—actually an interactive map—of train routes in the city. And by train, Philadelphia has your standard suburban commuter heavy rail and subway lines and light rail lines, but we also make use of a number of trolley lines.
What the map does not show are the city’s various bus routes, all of which that run within the city are suspended. There are bus routes and rail lines outside the city, most notably the commuter rail or the blue lines in the map, operated by a different union that is not on strike.
Credit for the piece goes to the Philly.com graphics department.
In case you missed it, two weeks ago President Duterte of the Philippines had some interesting things to say regarding the relationship between the Philippines and the United States. “America has lost” and “separation from the U.S.” were among the two big lines he spoke to a Chinese audience. But the Philippines are an important part of President Obama’s pivot to Asia strategy as we have been spending money and time improving defence ties. Naturally issues like the the pivot underpin Trump’s claims about poor judgment when it comes to the Obama/Clinton foreign policy.
The pivot’s improving defence ties come at a time of region-wide increases in defence spending. Thankfully Bloomberg put together an article with some nice graphics earlier this year. As someone who has always had an interest in naval things if not military things, see my numerous posts on that here, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the article and digesting the graphics. The one below compares the strengths of the Chinese fleets to those American fleets permanently assigned to the Pacific Ocean region.
Of course the question becomes, beyond making our military stronger, just what would Trump do to counter or affect the arms race in the Asia Pacific region?
Credit for the piece goes to the Bloomberg graphics department.
Well the election is next Tuesday, and last Friday and this past weekend was…interesting. So one(ish) week to go, and we are going to turn to a few posts that use data visualisation and graphics to explore topics related to the election.
Today we start with the latest tracking polls, released on Friday. The piece comes from the Washington Post and highlights the closing gap between Clinton and Trump with a sudden spike in Republican candidate support. But what I really like about the piece is the plot below. It displays the 0 axis vertically and plots time with the most recent date at the top. And then support for the various demographics can be filtered by selectable controls above the overall plot.
Of course the really interesting bit is going to be how much this changes in the next seven days. And then what that means for the results when we all wake up on Wednesday morning.
Credit for the piece goes to Chris Alcantara, Kevin Uhrmacher, and Emily Guskin.
Congratulations, you made it to Friday. So let’s try to put that in perspective. And by that, I mean things like mines and Death Stars. Thanks to my good friend Jonathan Fairman for sharing with me this post on Core77 that uses the power of Kevin Wisbith’s Photoshop skills to compare the sizes of things. And yes, that obviously includes mines and Death Stars. But having lived in Chicago for a number of years, you get the mine photo. Because yeah, that thing must be deep.
Credit for the original work goes to Kevin Wisbith.
70+ million people watched the debate last week. But, 2.5 million people have already voted. Me? Well in Pennsylvania there is no early voting, so you queue up on Election Day. But that also means I will have had the full election season to brush up on candidates for president and all the other offices. But what about early voters? Well the Washington Post put together an article last week about the numbers of early voters—hence my figures in the opening—and the amount of information they might have missed.
From a design standpoint, it is a really nice article that blends together large centre-piece graphics such as the above to smaller in-line graphics to margin graphics. None are interactive; all are static. But in these cases, users do not need the freedom to interact with the charts. Instead, the designers have selected the points in time or data points more relevant to the story.
Overall the piece is solid work.
Credit for the piece goes to Kevin Uhrmacher and Lazaro Gamio.
If you didn’t already know, the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces are moving on Mosul, a city in northern Iraq overrun by ISIS back in 2014. The New York Times has illustrated a satellite image of the Mosul area to show how the forces are progressing in their assault on the city.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
AT&T is attempting to merge with Time Warner in order to have more/better control of a content pipeline. But as this Wall Street Journal article points out, the concept of tie-ups between media and telecoms is not exactly new. Especially since the breakup of the old Bell Telephone company.
Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
