Coffee Spoons – Page 54 – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

The Rise of White Nationalist Terrorism

Whilst I was on holiday, a terrorist killed nearly fifty people in Christchurch, New Zealand. Except this time, he was a white man and the victims were all Muslims. Admittedly, I really did not read much about it until I returned to the States, but it clearly is not a thing I was expecting out of New Zealand. But the Economist looked at the question of whether this shooting is more of another in a pattern or a one-off.

The graphic does a fairly good job of showing the increasing frequency of right-wing/white nationalist terror attacks. From a design standpoint, the nice touch is the use of transparency to show overlapping events. For example, the concentric circles for Utoya and Oslo show the two Anders Breivik attacks in Norway.

You could arguably say the treatment begins to fail, however, in the US/Canada timeline. Here, regrettably, there are often too many attacks in too close proximity that the dots are too overlaid. Here I wonder if some other method of stacking or offsetting the incidents could work.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist data team.

Video Orientation Guide

We made it to Friday, everybody. Although for me it, was a short week. I spent the last week on holiday in Ireland to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. And that meant I took a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. But the question when taking a photo is, in which orientation should I take the shot? A few times people would ask me to take their photo and I would take them both vertically and horizontally. Well, thankfully, xkcd has us all set with a guide to shooting video by orientation.

It's easiest with dynamically rotating televisions for video playback. — It’s easiest with dynamically rotating televisions for video playback.

I have to admit, I definitely took one or two diagonal photos.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Regions of German Nationalism

The Economist has an interesting piece looking at the areas of support for the far-right AfD German political party, arguably a neo-fascist nationalist party. It turns out that

Historical analogies are dangerous, but fascinating.

The piece does a great job of setting the case through the demographics map at the top of the piece. It shows how the two areas where the largest AfD support experienced the least changes from prior to the war. And with those demographics in place, the support for hardline nationalism might still be present, as is indicated by the support for the AfD.

In terms of the municipality maps, I would be curious if the hexagon tile map is because those borders have changed. Obviously 84 years can change political boundaries.

But I wonder if a single map could have been done showing the correlation between the 1933 vote and the 2017 vote. Of course, the difficulty could well be in that political boundaries may have changed.

And of course, we should not go so far as to compare the AfD to Nazism.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Angry Birds? Bad Birds

Baseball is almost upon us. And oh boy do the Baltimore Orioles look bad. How bad? Historically bad. FiveThirtyEight went so far as to chart the expected WAR, wins above replacement, of each position of all teams since 1973. And the expected Orioles lineup looks remarkably bad.

What is nice about this graphic is the use of the medium grey for each team/year combination. I may have used a filled orange dot instead of open, but the dots do at least standout and show the poor positioning of just about everything but the second baseman.

Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.

Why the Faces?

Stepping away from both the Brexit drama and the aircraft drama of the week, let’s look at US political drama. Specifically, the Democratic field and some of the early support for candidates and assumed-to-be candidates.

This piece comes from an article about the bases of various candidates. From a data visualisation perspective it uses a scatter plot to compare the net favourability of the candidate to the share of people who have an opinion about said candidate.

A veritable who's who of the Democratic field — A veritable who’s who of the Democratic field

But what if you don’t know who the candidate is? As in, you don’t know what they look like. Well, then it might be difficult to find Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. This kind of graphic relies on facial recognition. I’m not certain that’s the best, especially when one is talking about a field in which people may not know or have an opinion on the candidates in question.

Another drawback is that the sizes of the faces are large. And, especially in the lower left corner, this makes it easier to obscure candidates. Where exactly is Sherrod Brown? Between a unidentified face and that of Terry McAuliffe.

I think a more simplistic dot/circle approach would have worked far better in this instance.

Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.

All the Tabs

I am definitely guilty of this piece from Indexed. But it’s Friday, so I can open as many tabs as I want.

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Similar Airspeed Patterns

Yesterday we looked at the isolation of the US and Canada in keeping the Boeing 737 Max aircraft in the air. Later that day, both countries grounded those aircraft. Today in the print edition of the New York Times the front page used significant space to chart the vertical speed of the two crashed aircraft.

It uses the same scale on the y-axis and clearly shows how the aircraft gaining and losing vertical speeds. I am not sure what is gained by the shading below the 0 baseline. I do really enjoy the method of using a chart below the airspeeds to show the periods of increasing and decreasing vertical speed.

Credit for the piece Jin Wu, K.K. Rebecca Lai, and Joe Ward.

The US Flies Alone

On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This was the second crash in less than a year, since the another 737 Max 8 crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia. And in the intervening months, there have been numerous reports to American regulators from pilots of problems with aircraft in flight. Unsurprisingly, international regulators have begun to take steps to protect their skies and their passengers from what might be an unsafe aircraft. American regulators, the Federal Aviation Administration, remains unconvinced.

Consequently, the New York Times put together a graphics-driven article that details just how extensive the global grounding of 737 Max 8 aircraft has been in the last 24 hours.

There's a lot more orange than blue. — There’s a lot more orange than blue.

It’s a route map to headline the article. And it shows that almost all aircraft on 737 Max 8 routes, except for those in Canada and the United States, have been grounded.

The rest of the article makes use of more maps highlighting the countries who civil aviation authorities have grounded flights and popular routes. It also includes a bar chart showing how many 737 Max 8 aircraft are in use with each airline and how many of those airlines have had their fleets grounded.

Overall, it’s a strong article that makes great use of graphics to illustrate its point about the magnitude of the grounding and the isolation of the United States and Canada.

Credit for the piece goes to Denise Lu, Allison McCann, Jin Wu, and K.K. Rebecca Lai.

Demanding the Impossible

The key problem in the Brexit deal remains what to do with the Irish border. In essence, the UK faces the same trilemma it has since the beginning. It wants three things it cannot have at the same time: exiting the EU single market and customs union, so it can create a free and independent trade policy; no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, per the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles; and territorial integrity, i.e. no hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK in the Irish Sea.

Essentially, the UK can choose two of these three options. Below, I have attempted to show how they relate and what the result is once two of the options have been chosen.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Another Week, Another Brexit Vote

Yet again, we are poised to watch the British House of Commons this week as it votes on several key pieces of Brexit-related legislation. In short, MPs are set to vote on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Again. Basically the same one that MPs rejected by a historic margin last month. The question is will they vote against it again?

Thankfully the Guardian put together a graphic explaining what will happen now as a flow chart.

So get ready for a week of fascinating votes.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.