Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: The Brightest Night Lites
Today is Friday. We all made it through yet another week. So let us look up into the evening sky tonight and see the Hertzsprung–Russel diagram in action. Or, we can take xkcd’s expanded version and just enjoy ourselves. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
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The London Job Exodus
Read on…: The London Job ExodusBrexit is bad for Britain. Here is some proof from an article by Bloomberg that looks at where London-based banking jobs are headed post-Brexit. Spoiler alert, not elsewhere in Britain. The article purports to be more of a tracker in that they will add on data about jobs moving places when news breaks. But I […]
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Chinese Urban Clusters
Read on…: Chinese Urban ClustersYesterday the Economist posted a graphic about Chinese urban clusters, of which the Chinese government is planning to create 19 as part of a development strategy. In terms of design, though, I saw it and said, “I remember doing something like that several years ago”. The Economist piece looks at just the geography of the Chinese […]
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The Evolution of the S&P 500
Read on…: The Evolution of the S&P 500I found myself doing a bit of summer cleaning yesterday and I stumbled upon a few graphics of interest. This one comes from a September 2016 Wall Street Journal article about the changes in the S&P 500, a composite index of American stocks, some of the 500 largest. In terms of the page design, if it were not […]
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Family Migration Patterns
Read on…: Family Migration PatternsOn Saturday I attended an all-day seminar by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) at the new Museum of the American Revolution here in Philadelphia. Just fantastic. One of the lectures included some maps that looked at the distribution of families over a year span—turns out families did not stand still. Instead, they tended […]
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For Whom to Root
Read on…: For Whom to RootThe World Cup continues. Well for a few teams. Some have already been eliminated from the Round of 16. But for those Americans rooting for Team America, well, if you have not yet figured it out, you got knocked out well before the World Cup even started by…Panama. And so you are stuck in the […]
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World Cup Match Probabilities
Read on…: World Cup Match ProbabilitiesThe World Cup has had some impressive matches and some stunners. (And the two are not mutually exclusive.) But if you are like me and have to work during most of the broadcasts, how can you follow along? Well thankfully FiveThirtyEight put together a nice statistical model that provides the probability of a team winning—or […]
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When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of its Parts
Read on…: When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of its PartsLast week we talked a lot about trade—and we will get back to it. But the World Cup is now in full swing and I want to take a look at a couple of things this week. But to begin, the Economist published an article about the difficulty of predicting the outcome of World Cups. […]
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It’s Finally Sunny in Philadelphia (on the Weekend)
Read on…: It’s Finally Sunny in Philadelphia (on the Weekend)Here in Philadelphia, the weekend is forecast to be not rainy, which is a departure from the last several weeks. So this piece from xkcd’s Randall Munroe seemed appropriate. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.