The Secret Service screwed up not so long ago with the whole hookers in Colombia scandal. (Proof that it pays to pay.) This infographic was passed along to me by my colleague Eileen and it investigates the results of congressional hearings into the Secret Service.
This piece is doing some interesting things within the framework of the donut chart I generally dislike. We do get to see the levels of detail for different departments or areas of spending. For example, one can see that costs for building Australia’s new destroyers and how that fits into the whole budget. Or, by clicking on a slice of the donut, one can zoom in to see how pieces fit at the selected level.
But the overall visual comparison of pieces and then identifying them through colour is less than ideal.
Found via the Guardian’s datablog, credit for the piece goes to Prosple and OzDocsOnline.
For the Queen’s Jubilee I had been looking for a good infographic or two about how the United Kingdom had changed over the length of her reign, at least thus far. Alas, I found not a great deal of substantial work. This is an infographic from the Guardian that looks at quite a few single figures.
But it also has a map looking at the decline/unravelling of the British Empire.
It’s like a log cabin. But taller. A lot taller. The New York Times reports with an infographic on a nine-story block of flats (apartment building for us Americans) in London called the Graphite Apartments that was built almost entirely of timber.
Last week, the New York Times looked at the growing education gap amongst this country’s largest metropolitan areas. The infographic, click the image below to go to the full version, is perhaps a bit more layered, nuanced, and complex than it looks at first. In about forty years, the number of adults with college degrees has doubled, good, but so too has the spread of those numbers across the set of cities, bad. And then to look at any geographic spread, the two datasets are mapped geospatially. By my eye, the Northeast and Pacific Northwest seem to be doing fairly well. Not so much around the rest of the country.
Nobody likes people cheating the unemployment system for benefits. Especially Canadians apparently. So this is a proposal to encourage the unemployed to start working.
Canada is getting old. At least so the Canadian census data says. As a percentage of the population, the map made by the National Post below looks at where the old people are. Within reason, one would expect to perhaps see a more even distribution across all of Canada. However, it appears that the northern territories and provinces have fewer old people than their southern counterparts.
Old Canada
Credit for the piece goes to Andrew Barr, Jonathon Rivait, and Richard Johnson.
A few days ago the Golden Gate Bridge turned 75. I had been hoping to see an interesting infographic or two about the bridge and its history appear. Alas, none worthy of posting have made their way to my digital desk. So instead I am stepping into the time machine, really just a cardboard box with some drawn-on dials, and pulling out this piece from the San Francisco Chronicle.
It looks at suicides from the bridge by location over its history—up until the graphic was made obviously. I’ve linked to a larger version of the graphic rather than the Chronicle’s site, because their graphic is shrunk too small to be legible.
I generally refrain from posting links to my professional work. Normally because I’d have to be the first to criticise it and tear it apart. But also because a lot of it is confidential and behind the paywall—it’s like the Iron Curtain meets the Great Wall but really a lot less interesting.
Yet from time to time, through the work and deeds of others, things escape and make it into the wild. Then things are fair game. This is one of those times and one of those pieces. The image links to the third-party page.
In a rare infographic misstep, the New York Times published an incorrect diagram detailing the centre of the Earth.
Centre of the Earth
Clearly, anyone who knows anything about science knows that it is not a solid core of iron at the centre of the Earth, but dinosaurs. And I see no dinosaurs in this diagram.
Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum, Ritchie S. King, and Frank O’Connell.