Coffee Spoons – Page 111 – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

Irish Coalition Government

As I alluded to yesterday, in addition to visualising Irish election results the Irish Times built a coalition builder.

The current coalition is far from a majority in the new Dáil

The principle behind the visualisation is sound: how could a government be created? And so the user goes away and creates his or her fantasy government. From a design perspective, the piece is nice with bold, party-related colours and clear controls. The Irish Times also included a nice subtlety with independent TDs (members of the Dáil) as clicking the plus button does not add all ten, but one person at a time. That reflects the fact the independents are not a whole party but ten individuals.

But I personally keep returning to a single question: how realistic are these fantasies? I think an addition that would benefit the story-telling element of the piece would be a guided narrative. Start with the screenshot above, which presents the coalition from the previous Dáil. Clearly they are far from a majority. A guided narrative could explain the likelihood and possible priorities of a various number of plausible coalitions. It would also be able to exclude the more ridiculous pairings.

Credit for the piece goes to the Irish Times’ graphics department.

The Shape of the 32nd Dáil

Ireland calls its lower-house of parliament the Dáil and its prime minister taoiseach. When I visited Dublin, election season was in full swing and upon the first Friday of my return to Chicago, Ireland went to the polls to elect the 32nd Dáil. The vote resulted in a hung parliament, i.e. with no single party in control—there are more than two political parties. The Irish Times put together an interactive piece looking at the makeup of the new assembly. (There is also a coalition builder, but we will take a look at that separately.)

Credit for the piece goes to the Irish Times’ graphics department.

Pipelines of Consumption

It’s Friday, everybody. Let’s take a bit of a break from the election stuff of this past week and look at the pipelines of your liquid consumption.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Tracking Super Tuesday

On Tuesday I tracked the results primarily with the New York Times and the Washington Post. I really enjoyed the Post’s coverage as they designed a homepage for the night’s results. The results were placed at the centre of the content, as you can see in the screenshot below. Below the map and table, content updated on the right with links to more static content on the left.

The map and table above naturally updated throughout the course of evening. I found their decision to move states from one table to the other when the race was declared a brilliant little decision. When reinforced with a small checkmark, the movement from the lower table to the final table at the top gave a real sense of progress—maybe momentum—to the victories of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Overall, this was a very helpful site for me to follow the results streaming in Tuesday night.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

GOP Media Time

Well, Super Tuesday is over. And if you spent last night under a rock, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton cleaned almost enough house to brush away their competition. Almost. The political analysis begins…now. But we will leave that for another day. I liked this one particular chart from FiveThirtyEight’s coverage.

We have a nice set of small multiples—please kill the cute illustrations of the candidates’ heads—comparing the number of items in Google News and Google Searches. The graphic goes a long way in showing just how much coverage Trump has received over the past few months against very little for others.

Credit for the piece goes to FiveThirtyEight’s graphics department.

Super Tuesday Time

Super Tuesday is the first test of an American presidential candidate’s ability to run—and win—a semi-national campaign. Unlike the one-off primaries or caucuses in places like Iowa or New Hampshire, for today, each candidate has had to prepare for votes in 11 states. And these states are as varied as Alabama to Texas to Massachusetts to Alaska. Consequently, Super Tuesday also means lots of delegates are at stake.

So before the results are announced, let’s look at Bloomberg Politic’s piece that is basically a delegate counter with explanations. (Because right now super-delegates are not at stake.) In the interactive graphic side, we have a counter for every pledged delegate.

The Republican landscape before the voting

I think in the big box up top, the only missing element is some visual measure of just how far each candidate remains from the magic number. In the Republican case, that is 1237 delegates. Below that, however, I really love the tiles that summarise the individual state results, both in delegates and vote share. (After all, some states are entirely proportional, some semi-proportional, and some none-at-all/winner-take-all.)

Credit for the piece goes to Alex Tribou and Jeremy Scott Diamond.

Fighting Off My Jet Lag

As I mentioned earlier this week, I visited London for work for a week and then took some rollover holiday time to stay around London and then visit Dublin. But now I am back. And this week that has meant all the jet lag. And while everybody experiences jet lag and recovers from it differently, I wanted to take a look at my experience. The data and such is below. But the basic point, it is about four days before I return to normal.

What is missing, unfortunately, is the Chicago-to-London data. Because anecdotally, that was far, far worse than the return flight.

Credit is my own.

Cramming People Into Tiny Little Tubes

I was in London for work two weeks ago and our main office is near Farringdon Station, one of the new hubs of London transport when Crossrail goes live later this decade. Earlier this week, Crossrail’s official name was unveiled: Elizabeth Line. Last year, the Economist had an article about ridership of the London Underground and how cramped it is. (I only rode it once during rush-hour and that was when I was on holiday.) The idea is that the Elizabeth Line will ease congestion for those people trying to cross London east-to-west both within the city and from the outer suburbs. Plus to and from this little airport called Heathrow.

Anyway, the article made use of a really smart heatmap to illustrate the number of riders in 15-minute intervals. It then highlights the traditional “rush hour”. The highlight illustrates that rush hour in London is more like rush-three-hours. Overall a smart piece.

And as bonus points for their designer, look at how they segment out the difference between 15-minutes and hours. Note how it is just a pixel or two greater gap, but that makes it far easier to carry the time chunks into the middle of the chart.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s graphics department.

The Zika Virus Potential in the United States

We hear ever more about the Zika virus that currently plagues South America. But the fact is that the mosquito that carries it could inhabit some regions of the United States as well as the South American tropics. Over at the Daily Viz, there was an article about just what the potential numbers could be.

The Zika-carrying mosquito's potential range — The Zika-carrying mosquito’s potential range

The piece is a nice reminder that not every important story needs a super-complicated graphic. It just needs a clean, clear, and concise graphic. The threat here is to parts of the American south. But, as yesterday’s post showed, ever more people are moving there and so that puts roughly 80 million Americans in harm’s way.

Also, another validation of my dislike of warm weather.

Credit for the piece goes to Matt Stiles.

How Much Warmer Was 2015

When I was over in London and Dublin, most days were cool and grey. And a little bit rainy. Not very warm. (Though warmer than Chicago.) But, that is weather—highly variable on a daily basis. Climate is longer-term trends and averages. Years, again, can be highly variable—here’s looking at you kid/El Niño. But, even in that variability, 2015 was the warmest year on record. So the New York Times put together a nice interactive piece allowing the user to explorer data for available cities in terms of temperature and precipitation.

You can see the big chart is temperature with monthly, cumulative totals of precipitation. (I use Celsius, but you can easily toggle to Fahrenheit.) Above the chart is the total departure of the yearly average. Anyway, I took screenshots of Philadelphia and Chicago. Go to the New York Times to check out your local cities.

Credit for the piece goes to K.K. Rebecca Lai and Gregor Aisch.