At the end of the month the world will gather in Paris, France for the next round of climate change talks. In advance of the talks, the Financial Times put together this model of how emissions reductions will help—or not—get climate change under control. The piece is two-fold. The first is a ten-step narrative that showcases the tool’s split of the time series into short-, medium-, and long-term impacts and how those work in the best and worst case scenarios. But it then allows the user to jump right on in and create their own scenarios.
Is it getting hot out there?
Credit for the piece goes to John Burn-Murdoch and Pilita Clark.
The day after Election Day—no, not that Election Day—we take a look at a nice scatter plot from FiveThirtyEight. They explore how an eventual conservative candidate, whoever that may be, will face a structural challenge. There are slightly more delegates at play in blue states than red. And typically those blue Republicans are “less religious, more moderate and less rural.” The big graphic supporting their argument looks at the value of the primary votes. Surprise, surprise, the higher-value primary votes come from blue states.
The relative value of the votes
Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.
Turkey held its elections over the weekend. And so on the way to work this morning I decided to check the results on the BBC. And I saw this graphic—screenshot from my phone.
The BBC results
So I decided to scrap today’s blog post and instead spend all of five minutes tweaking this to make it a bit clearer. Or, a lot clearer. Simple little tweaks can make all the difference in data clarity. Now you can visually see the scale of difference in the votes. You also don’t need to refer to a legend off to the side with tints of the same colour.
My results with their data
Credit for the original piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Paul Ryan is about to takeover for John Boehner as Speaker of the House. So the Washington Post put together a nice graphic-featuring article about how Ryan compares to previous speakers—turns out he is fairly young. But the end of the piece uses this graphic to look at the number of days, i.e. experience, each speaker had prior to taking the role.
But try comparing him to someone other than Boehner…
By putting the dots around a circle, the Post has created an interesting graphic. But the format makes it difficult to compare individuals who are not close together.
Canada held an election yesterday. For your briefing on it, John Oliver did a great job on Last Week Tonight. But for the serious coverage, we have results.
Here we have the results coverage by the National Post. It’s your standard choropleth coloured by the victor in each riding, or constituency. From a design side, I find the pattern fill interesting and not something I have seen done before for a political map.
I just chose a place I had visited in Canada
But I really like what the CBC did. They built an interactive application to cover the evening’s results as they arrived. This screenshot is for the riding in Fredericton, where my ancestors lived in the 19th century. (I had to have a connection to the ridings somehow.) In particular, I liked the ability to star ridings of interest and have them immediately retrievable. The CBC complemented that with a list of ridings to watch. It was a great resource for the evening.
Fredericton results
But then they also covered the results with an article with interactive graphics. This is more your standard fare with choropleths, bar charts, and line charts. But they flow through the article quite sensibly. Overall, a solid results piece.
Party results per region
Credit for the National Post piece goes to the National Post graphics department.
Credit for the CBC piece goes to the the CBC graphics department.
I don’t know about you, but I have seen a lot of those all-day breakfast bags sitting about the city of Chicago the last few days. (That they are not in waste bins is a different story.) CBS took a look at where the biscuit vs. McMuffin offering is available in the US—hint, not Chicago—and compared that geographic spread to something else. It’s worth a quick look.
Where to go for biscuits
Credit for the piece goes to CBS graphics department.
Last month we looked at the Washington Post’s coverage of the second Republican Debate. For those unaware, the first Democratic Debate was held last night. And so it is only fair for us to look at the Post’s coverage of that event.
Who engaged whom
Credit for the piece goes to Samuel Granados, Richard Johnson, Denise Lu, Ted Mellnik, and Kevin Schaul.
Migrants and refugees continue to reach Europe. But some of those people can be sent back, depending upon their country of origin. The tricky part is that there is no common set of countries as this graphic from the Economist shows.
The safe list
In terms of design, we see nothing too elaborate here. This is really just a table where checks, half-checks, and exes would have sufficed. But, sometimes, a table is really all you need to convey the important data.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.
From time to time in my job I hear the desire or want for more different types of charts. But in this piece by Nick Brown over on Medium, we can see that there are really only a few key forms and some are already terrible—here’s looking at you, pie charts. How new are some of these forms? Turns out most are not that new—or very new depending on your history/timeline perspective. Brown illustrated that timeline by hand.
A timeline of chart forms
Worth the read is his thoughts on what is new for data visualisation and what might be next. No spoilers.
Today marks the final start of the year for Rich Hill of the Boston Red Sox. It’s also only his fourth start of the year. He was signed as depth as attrition left an empty spot in the rotation. In his three starts, however, he has given up only three runs in 23 innings while striking out 30 and walking only two. How does he do it? Over at Baseball Prospectus they took a look at Hill’s curveball and the deception he generates from his arm slot and the location of his fastball. They show this by a comparison graphic. I’ve added the names of the two players, but otherwise the graphic is unaltered.
Hill is on the left
If I am lucky, I can catch this last Hill start at the pub tonight.
