A day early given the weekend…so yeah, I’m (mostly) Irish-American. So this post is for the (extended) family.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Category: Uncategorized
What’s Your Drug of Choice?
Over at the Guardian, people are playing with data about drug use. The data comes from the Global Drug Survey, and Ian Taylor and the Guardian worked together to create this interactive piece that lets you either browse drug use comparisons between Americans and Brits or compare two specific drugs between our two peoples. It looks like we al drink though…
Credit, again, goes to the Guardian and Ian Taylor.
How to Draw a Star
xkcd presents this instructional diagram of how to (not) draw a star.
Busting Bunkers
There is quite a lot of talk these days about the possibility of Israel, either with or without American assistance, launching an attack on Iran to halt the further development of its nuclear programme. The trouble is that Israel may not have the weapons necessary to carry out a successful attack, but the US has quite the arsenal. And one of the most useful, for just such a task is the Massive Ordnance Penetrator.
The National Post created an infographic to look at the bomb and just how it might be used if the US should decide to use it.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Faille and Richard Johnson.
Senate Polarity
Earlier this month I posted about how the New York Times looked at the polarisation of the US Senate. Now the National Journal has another, similar visualisation attempting to explain the political gridlock that was picked up by the Atlantic.
For those wondering, the National Journal ranks senators on their conservativeness–liberalness by their votes and that is the plotted data.
Credit for the piece goes to the National Journal.
Compare and Contrast
xkcd reminds us that not all infographics need to be complex to tell a tale.
How Popular Is Your Home State?
Public Policy Polling had a survey in February where they polled respondents on whether they had favourable or unfavourable attitudes towards states, or if they were not sure. As a Pennsylvania transplant to Illinois, I can say that Pennsylvania came out a bit better than Illinois. But how about your state?
A Not So Smart Smartphone Chart
This piece in the Globe and Mail of Toronto looks at smartphone usage by operating system through a comparison of Canada to both the United States and Japan.
While I understand the need for aesthetic distinction from having an entire page of bar charts, these ring or donut charts are a touch misleading. Because of the space between rings, the radius of each circle from the central Android icon is significantly increased. This of course proportionally scales up the length of each segment within the rings. In short, it becomes difficult to compare segments of each ring to the corresponding segments on the other rings without looking at the datapoint. And if you need to look at the datapoint, one could argue that the infographic has failed from the standpoint of communication of the data.
Beneath is the original (with the legend edited to fit into my cropping) with two very simple (and hasty) reproductions of the data as straight pie charts placed next to each other and then as clusters of bar charts grouped beneath each other. I leave it to you the audience to decide which is easiest to decode.
Credit for the Globe and Mail piece goes to Carrie Cockburn.
Delivery Routes
Sunday in the New York Times, an article on bicycle delivery had an accompanying infographic. It detailed the dinner route of the article’s main individual. The piece is an interesting use of small multiples to provide a timeline of a route, while each new delivery maintains the old paths for reference. And from a data perspective, I found it good to acknowledge the one instant where the follower lost contact with the delivery man.
One Size Does Not Fit All
The subject matter of this piece is out of my area of expertise, but should you be in the UK and looking at women’s fashion, apparently not all listed sizes are the same. This piece by Anna Powell-Smith takes as an input a woman’s size measurements and then best fits them to the known sizes by several major brands by type of outfit: shirt, skirt, and dress.
