Tag: critique

  • Dove vs. Hawk

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier, I saw these two graphics floating around the Twitter. They each come from a major financial institution and attempt to place the voting (and non-voting members) of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on a spectrum of doves to hawks or slightly less dovish. The FOMC, part of the Federal Reserve system, sets interest…

  • Needle Time

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday was maybe the last election day for the 2020 US General Election. (There are still a few US House seats yet to be called, most notably a contested race in upstate New York.) These were a pair of runoff elections in Georgia for the state’s two US Senate seats (one for a full, six-year…

  • Difficult Descendancy Charts

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    Brendan Barry
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    The holiday break is over as your author has burned up all his remaining time for 2020 and so now we’re back to work. And that means attempting to return to a more frequent and regular posting schedule for Coffeespoons. I wanted to start with the death of Diego Maradona, a legendary Argentinian footballer. He…

  • Warmer, Wetter Winters in the UK

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    Brendan Barry
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    I remember hearing and reading stories as a child about the Thames in London freezing over and hosting winter festivals. Of course most of that happened during what we call the Little Ice Age, a period of below average temperatures during the 15th through the early 19th century. But those days are over. The UK’s…

  • Biden’s Biggest Pyramids

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday we looked at an article from the Inquirer about the 2020 election and how Biden won because of increased margins in the suburbs. Specifically we looked at an interactive scatter plot. Today I want to talk a bit about another interactive graphic from the same article. This one is a map, but instead of…

  • Biden Won the Burbs

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    Brendan Barry
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    The thing with election results is that we don’t have the final numbers for a little while after Election Day. And that’s normal. There are a few things I want to look at in the coming weeks and months once my schedule eases up a bit. But for now, we can use this nice piece…

  • Choose Your Own FiveThirtyEight Adventure

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    Brendan Barry
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    In case you weren’t aware, the US election is in less than a week, five days. I had written a long list of issues on the ballot, but it kept getting longer and longer so I cut it. Suffice it to say, Americans are voting on a lot of issues this year. But a US…

  • Covid Migration

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yep, Covid-19 remains a thing. About a month or so ago, an article in City Lab (now owned by Bloomburg), looked at the data to see if there was any truth in the notion that people are fleeing urban areas. Spoiler: they’re not, except in a few places. The entire article is well worth a…

  • Positioning Is Important

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday Pew Research released the results of a survey of how the rest of the world views select countries throughout the world. The Washington Post covered it in an article and created some graphics to support the text. The text, of course, was no big surprise in that the rest of the world views the…

  • Double Your Hurricanes, Double Your Fun

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    Brendan Barry
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    In a first, the Gulf of Mexico basin has two active hurricanes simultaneously. Unfortunately, they are both likely to strikes somewhere along the Louisiana coastline within approximately 36 hours of each other. Fortunately, neither is strong as a storm named Katrina that caused a mess of things several years ago now. Over the last few…