Tag: critique

  • Baseball vs. Basketball vs. Hockey

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    There was an interesting article in Forbes on Monday that looked at baseball’s popularity. In short, the commonly believed argument is that baseball is becoming less popular vs. sports like football, basketball, &c. Hence, one of the reasons for the pace of play changes. However, last Wednesday, there were three nationally televised playoff games—two in…

  • Germanwings Flight 4U 9525

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Yesterday an Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, crashed in the French Alps with no survivors. This morning, I am showing the two best graphics I have come across thus far attempting to explain just what happened. The first is from the New York Times. In a series of maps, it points…

  • Rainbowship Enterprise

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    You can rightly file this one under what the fuck, which is how I found it on WTF Visualizations. The piece appears to be some sort of comprehensive guide to minerals, nutrients, and in which foods you can find them. But, as the critique title declares, this is more like Rainbowship Enterprise. How this is…

  • America’s Most Popular Beers—And Almost All Are Crappy

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Or so says Adweek. I would heartily disagree about their inclusion of Yuengling in their group of crappy. Though the other nineteen, yeah, I would tend to agree. Regardless, the infographic that sparked the Adweek post is quite blah. I do enjoy the illustrations of the bottles and labels, but the data visualisation below is…

  • Squaring Up London

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Choropleths are not always a good idea. For example, look at election maps. Highly populated but geographically small cities appear as mere drops of ink on paper or pixels on a screen. Meanwhile, vast deserts appear gigantic empires. Nothing new there. But even within cities, these issues exist. London is one such city and one…

  • Importing Russian Gas

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s post is a graphic from the New York Times that looks at Russia’s hold on energy across Europe. I’m not terribly keen on this particular graphic for a few reasons. First, the design needs to incorporate the actual datapoint so the reader can compare across countries. Comparing the height of each black bar to…

  • Viewing the Economy All at Once

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Normally I try to reserve Fridays for the lighter stuff. But yesterday, the New York Times published a really fantastic piece about how the Great Recession changed the American economy through job growth or loss in each sector of the economy. Naturally this sounds very difficult because the American economy is both very large and…

  • How Africa Tweets

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s piece is hit and miss. It comes from the World Economic Forum and the subject matter is the use of Twitter across Africa. I think the subject matter is interesting; mobile communication technology is changing Africa drastically. The regional trends shown in the map at the core of the piece are also fascinating. Naturally…

  • Don’t Do This At Home…

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    In fact, don’t do this ever. Today’s bad chart comes from the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities. I saw it and could only shake my head and wonder why. Something more like this much more easily communicates the story. Credit for the original piece goes to the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities.

  • Average Ticket Prices in 2013

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    So yeah, the Super Bowl thing. Apparently tickets are expensive? Earlier, Bloomberg Businessweek took a look at average prices for the most expensive events of 2013. The only sentence supporting the graphic was that the most expensive event was not the Super Bowl. Okay, so what was? I think this graphic actually makes it more…