Tag: information design

  • Declining British Wages

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    Brendan Barry
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    Now for the actual piece for today. We have a scatterplot from the Financial Times that looks at wage and economic growth across the OECD, focusing on the exception that is the United Kingdom. And that is not an exception in the good sense. The UK had the rare privilege of experiencing economic growth—that’s good—while…

  • US Foreign Aid

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    One of the big news stories yesterday centred on the Trump administration’s budget outline that would expand US defence spending by 9%, or $54 billion. That is quite a lot of money. More worrying, however, was the draft’s directive that it be accompanied by equal spending cuts in neither security nor entitlement programmes like Social Security…

  • Marine Le Pen’s Chances

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last Friday the Economist published this article about the odds of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front party, winning the French presidential election in April. You may recall I focused on other things last Friday. So today we have this graphic. But this morning news broke about new allegations over fraudulent claims by…

  • UK By-election Results in Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Labour’s collapse in Copeland in particular is comically bad, but this Friday indulge me in a non-comedic post. Instead, Thursday night we had the results for the by-elections in Stoke and Copeland, two long-held Labour Party constituencies. Generally speaking in a by-election, the government of the UK can expect to see its vote share decrease…

  • Seven More Planets

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    What else did you guys think I was going to cover today? The by-elections in Copeland and Stoke? Well, yeah, we’ll likely get back to that tomorrow when we have some results. In the meantime…space! This is an animation from the New York Times about the Trappist-1 system that has seven Earth-sized planets, a few…

  • Scottish Independence?

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    Brendan Barry
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    I was having a conversation with a mate the other night about what Brexit means for Scottish independence. This mate, however, is an American. Because when American politics are depressing and nonsensical, we turn to British pol—wait, never mind. Despite the overall UK vote to leave the European Union, Scotland (and London, and Northern Ireland) voted…

  • Voting on Trump’s Cabinet

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    Brendan Barry
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    Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor, may have broken the law by talking to the Russian ambassador about Americans sanctions on Russia before Trump took office. One can imagine the furore surrounding the man and the post. However, the post is not confirmed by the Senate, but is appointed by the president. But how has the…

  • Thank Superman, It’s Finally Friday

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s been a long, exhausting week. Am I right? Well, thank Superman, it’s finally Friday. So today we have a post from xkcd about Superman. And birds and planes. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Snowfall in Philadelphia

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    Brendan Barry
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    Today, 9 February, it finally snowed significantly here in Philadelphia. In Chicago it probably snowed shortly after I moved out in September. Today’s graphic is a forecast map from philly.com using National Weather Service (NWS) data. I fail to understand the divergent palette—to be fair this is not the only instance of it throughout the meteorological…

  • Hans Rosling Has Died

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    It’s easy to miss the news these days. But as a designer who does a lot of work—and writes a blog about—data visualisation and information design, I was fortunate to catch the word that Hans Rosling died. You might know him best from his TED talks, but I became familiar with him through his Gapminder…