information design – Page 42

We’re All Just Palm Trees and Patio Furniture in the Wind

For all my American readers, I hope you all enjoyed their Labour Day holiday. For the rest of you, today is just a Tuesday. Unless you live in the Bahamas, then today is just another nightmarish day as Hurricane Dorian continues his assault on the islands.

The storm will be one for the record books when all is said and done, and not just because of the damage likely to be catastrophic when people can finally emerge and examine what remains. The storm, by several metrics, is one of the most powerful in the Atlantic since we started recording data on hurricanes. If we look at pressure and sustained wind speeds, i.e. not wind gusts, Sam Lillo has plotted the path of Dorian through those metrics and found it sitting scarily in the lower-right corner of this plot.

How low can it go? Probably not much, thankfully.

The graphic does a couple of nice things here. I like the use of colour to indicate the total number of observations in that area. Clearly, we see a lot more of the weaker, higher pressure storms. Hence the dark blue in the upper-left. But then against that we have the star of the graphic, and my favourite part of the plot: the plot over time of Dorian’s progress and intensification as a storm. The final green dot indicates the point of the last observation when the graphic was made.

Overall this is a simple and solid piece that shows in the available historical context just how powerful Dorian is. Unfortunately that correlates with likely heavy damage to the Bahamas.

Credit for the piece I presume goes to Sam Lillo, though with the Twitter one can never be entirely certain.

Hong Kong Identity

One of the things I have been following closely the last few months has been the protests in Hong Kong. The city is one of China’s few Special Administrative Regions—basically the former British colony of Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau, two cities bordering mainland China and separated by the Pearl River estuary.

Long story short, but since 1997 Hong Kong should enjoy 50 years of a legal system that is more aligned to that of its former status of a British colony than that of mainland China. But increasingly since Xi Jinping took power, he has been eroding those rights and the youth of Hong Kong have taken to the streets to protest, a right they enjoy but not the rest of mainland Chinese.

And so we have a survey looking at the identity by which those people living in Hong Kong choose to identify.

And it’s not Chinese.

From a news perspective, this poses problems for a Beijing-based Chinese government that is making pains to promote a greater Chinese identity throughout the world, least of all by pushing for a reunification with Taiwan by force if necessary. A generation of several million Hong Kongers and the way they raise their children, in addition to their friends and supporters abroad, weakens the authority of Beijing.

Hence the threat of a Tiananmen Square style crackdown on Hong Konger protestors.

Alas, the United States has been far more concerned with its trade dispute than it has been the democratic and human rights of several million people. At least, that is the impression given by the White House.

But, as to the design, I do not love the spaghettification of the line charts. Though I do appreciate that the Hong Kong identity has been separated by the maroon-coloured line. I wonder if labelling the lines in the small multiples is necessary given the decision to include the legend at the top of the chart.

The other tricky thing with this type of chart is that the data series is a population cohort. And yet the data is based on a time series. And so the cohorts vary over time. It might not be entirely clear to the audience that this (appears to be)/is a sample of people of an age at a particular date. How do those people change over the years? It’s hard to see that trend by separating out the data.

Overall, it’s a solid piece. And it’s important given the gravity of the protests in Hong Kong.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data team.

Pub Trivia Scores

So today we have pub trivia scores.

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted from my data recording of my Wednesday night’s team trivia pub scores. For the very few of us who know what this means, here you go.

We're on a downward trend — We’re on a downward trend

Essentially, our ability to score points on music in the last round remains pretty bad. Hence the general downward trend.

Credit for this piece goes to me.

The Amazon Burns

The G7 conference in France wrapped up yesterday and they announced an aid package for Brazil. Why? Because satellite data from both Brazil and the United States points to a rash of fires devastating the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest carbon sink, or sometimes known as the lungs of the Earth. I have not had time to check this statistic, but I read that 1/5 the world’s oxygen comes from the Amazon ecosystem. I imagine it is a large percentage given the area and the number of trees, but 20% seems high.

Regardless, it is on fire. Some is certainly caused by drier conditions and lightning strikes. But most is manmade. And so after the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro said his country did not have the resources to fight the fires, the G7 offered aid.

This morning, Bolsonaro refused it.

And so we have this map from InfoAmazonia that takes NASA data on observed fires for all of South America. I cropped my screencapture to Brazil.

A key feature to note here, in addition to that black background approach, is that you will see three distinct features: yellow hotspots fading to cold black areas, yellow dots with red outlines, and red dots. Each means something different. The yellow to red to black gradient simply means frequency of fires, the yellow dots with red outlines represent significantly hot fires from 2002 through 2014. The red dots are what concern us. Those are fires within the last month.

Sure enough, we see lots of fires breaking out across the Amazon. And Bolsonaro not only rejected the aid, but a few weeks ago he rejected similar data. He fired the head of a government agency tasked with tracking the deforestation of the Amazon after he released the agency’s monthly report detailing the deforestation. It had risen by 39%.

From a design standpoint, it is a solid piece. I do wonder, however, if some kind of toggle for the three datasets could have been added. Given the focus on the new fires breaking out, isolating those compared to the historic fires would be useful.

But before wrapping up, I also want to point out that there are a significant number of red dots appearing outside Brazil. The Amazon exists beyond borders, and there are a significant number of fires in neighbouring Bolivia and Paraguay. Let alone around the world…

Credit for the piece goes to InfoAmazonia.org.

Hog Wild

So admittedly this post should have been up last week, but I liked the lunar cycle one too much. But today is Friday and who cares. We made it to the end of the week.

In the wake of the shootings last week, someone on Twitter posed the question:

Legit question for rural Americans – How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?

And with that the Internet was off. Memes exploded across the social media verse. Thankfully the Washington Post took it seriously and found data on the expanding footprint of hogs in the United States.

The article also points out, however, that the firearm that prompted the discussion, the now infamous AR-15, would also be a poor choice against feral hogs as its too small a calibre to effectively deal with the animals.

Credit for the piece goes to the US Department of Agriculture.

A Very Loud Tube

As all my readers probably know, I love London. And in loving London, I love the Tube and the Oyster Card and all that goes along with Transport for London. But, I have noticed that sometimes when I take the Underground, there are segments where it gets a bit loud, especially with the windows open. The Economist covered this in a recent article where they looked at some data from a London-based design firm that makes noise protective gear. (For purposes of bias, that seems important to mention here.)

The data looks at decibels in a few Underground lines and when the levels reach potentially harmful levels. I took a screenshot of the Bakerloo line, with which I am familiar. (At least from Paddington to Lambeth.) Not surprisingly, there are a few segments that are quite loud.

I like this graphic—but like I said about bias, I’m biased. The graphic does a good job of using the above the 85-decibel line area fill to show the regions where it gets loud. And in general it works. However, if you look at the beginning of the Bakerloo line noise levels the jumps up in down in noise levels, because they happen so quickly in succession, begin to appear as a solid fill. It masks the importance of those periods where the noise levels are, in fact, potentially dangerous.

I have had to deal with this problem often in my work at the Fed, where some data over decades is available on a weekly basis. One trick that works, besides averaging the data, is thinning out the stroke of the line so the overlaps do not appear so thick. It could make it difficult to read, but it avoids the density issues at the beginning of that chart.

All in all, though, I would love a London-like transport system here in Philly. I’d rather some loud noises than polluting cars on the road.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Greenland, the 51st State?

If you haven’t heard, President Trump wants to buy Greenland from Denmark. So is Greenland going to beat Puerto Rico to joining the Union as the 51st state?

No.

Not even close.

It would be the smallest state in terms of population, but also one of the smallest US territories. But in terms of area, Greenland dwarfs every state but Alaska. Though it still beats Alaska by almost 50% of its land area.

It's like a super-charged Seward's Folly — It’s like a super-charged Seward’s Folly

I had hoped to include some more economic data, but that will have to wait for a different post. Acquiring the population data was actually the most difficult—the US Census Bureau does not actually have easy to access data on the populations of US territories not called Puerto Rico.

This piece is mine.

From Frying Pan to the Fires of a War Zone

Moving away from climate change now, we turn to the lovely land of Afghanistan. While the Trump administration continues to negotiate with the Taliban in hopes of ending the war, the war continues to go worse for Afghanistan, its government, and its allies, including the United States.

It is true that US and NATO ally deaths are down since the withdraw of combat troops in 2014. But, violence and sheer deaths are significantly up. And as this article from the Economist points out, the deaths in Afghanistan are now worse than they are in Syria.

The beginning of the article uses a timeline to chart the history of Afghan conflicts as well as the GDP and number of deaths. And it is a fascinating chart in its own right. But I wanted to share this, a small multiples featuring graphic looking at the geographic spread of deaths throughout the country.

Getting hotter (because red obviously means heat)

It does a nice job by chunking Afghanistan into discrete areas shaped as hexagons and bins deaths into those areas. All the while, the shape remains roughly that of Afghanistan with the Hindu Kush mountain range in particular overlaid. (Though, I am not sure why it is made darker in the 2003–04 map.)

To highlight particular cities or areas, hexagons are outlined to draw attention to the population centres of interest. But overall, the rise in violence and deaths is clear and unmistakable. And it has spread from what was once pockets in the south to the whole of the country that isn’t mountains or deserts.

Tamerlane would be proud.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Hotter Muggier Faster

Last week we looked at a few posts that showed the future impact of climate change at both a global and US-level scale. In the midst of last week and those articles, the Washington Post looked backwards at the past century or so to identify how quickly the US has changed. Spoiler: some places are already significantly warmer than they have been. Spoiler two: the Northeast is one such place.

The piece is a larger and more narrative article using examples and anecdotes to make its point. But it does contain several key graphics. The first is a big map that shows how temperature has changed since 1895.

The Southeast is an anomaly, but its warming has accelerated since the 1960s

The map does what it has to and is nothing particularly fancy or groundbreaking—see what I did there?—in design. But it is clear and communicates effectively the dramatic shifts in particular regions.

The more interesting part, along with what we looked at last week, is the ability to choose a particular county and see how it has trended since 1895 and compare that to the baseline, US-level average. Naturally, some counties have been warming faster, others slower. Philadelphia County, the entirety of the city, has warmed more than the US average, but thankfully less than the Northeast average as the article points out.

But, not to leave out Chicago as I did last week, Cook County, Illinois is right on line with the US average.

Nor is this, but it's average — Nor is this, but it’s average

But the big cities on the West Coast look very unattractive.

The interactive piece does a nice job clearly focusing the user’s attention on the long run average through the coloured lines instead of focusing attention on the yearly deviations, which can vary significantly from year to year.

And for those Americans who are not familiar with Celsius, one degree Celsius equals approximately 1.8º Fahrenheit.

Overall this is a solid piece that continues to show just what future generations are going to have to fix.

Credit for the piece goes to Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, John Muyskens, and Salwan Georges.

Lunar Cycles

Yesterday in the early hours of the morning was technically the latest full moon. And so since today is Friday and we all made it to the end of the week, it seems like a good time to let xkcd educate us all on lunar periodicity.

But what about lycanthrope correlations?

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.