Category: My Work

  • Low Expectations

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today the 2021 Major League Baseball season begins its playoffs. Tomorrow we get the Los Angeles Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals. Why the Dodgers, the team with the second-best record in all of baseball, need to play a one-game play-in is dumb, but a subject for perhaps another post. Tonight, however, is the American…

  • Covid Update: 29 September

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week when I wrote my update on Covid-19, we had seen a few signs for optimism, but in other states the news was hard to interpret or, in the case of Pennsylvania, not going the right way at all. So where are we this week? In some ways, not a lot has changed over…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Covid Update: 8 September

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last time we looked at the state of the Covid-19 pandemic in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois we had some encouraging signs. In particular we had evidence of a potential slowdown in New Jersey, Delaware, and Illinois and I wrote that I would not be surprised if we saw a peak in new…

  • Covid Update: 31 August

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    Brendan Barry
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    A brief bit of housekeeping, your author will be taking a brief holiday during which I won’t be posting. But I should return to posting next week. Last week we looked at some relatively good news in terms of the spread of Covid-19 in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. We…

  • Big Beer

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    Brendan Barry
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    A few weeks back, a good friend of mine sent me this graphic from Statista that detailed the global beer industry. It showed how many of the world’s biggest brands are, in fact, owned by just a few of the biggest companies. This isn’t exactly news to either my friend or me, because we both…