New York Times – Page 23

Nate Silver Predicts the Presidential Election

Of 2048. Well, kind of. Lately the country has been talking a lot about immigration and its impacts because of this bipartisan desire to achieve some kind of result on an immigration bill working its way through the Senate. One of the common thoughts is that if we legalise a whole bunch of illegals or document most of the undocumented (I’ll leave the language for you to decide), the new American citizens will overwhelmingly vote Democratic and there goes the Republic(an Party).

Nate Silver—yes, that Nate Silver who accurately predicted the presidential results and a whole bunch of other stuff too—looked at a more complex and more nuanced set of demographic variables and found that the aforementioned argument greatly oversimplifies the results. The problem is not entirely the entry of newly documented or illegal workers. Instead, there are systemic demographic issues.

So here comes the New York Times with an excellent data explorer and forecast modeller. You can set the year to examine and then set the results of the immigration debate with how many immigrants are made legal/documented and then how many of them vote. After that you can begin to adjust population growth, voting patterns, &c. to see how those affect the elections. (The obvious caveats of acts of god, party platforms, candidates, &c. all hold.)

The fascinating bit is that if you keep the demographic patterns as they are currently, adjusting the immigration factors at the outset have very little impact on the results. The country is moving towards the current Democratic platform. Even if 0% of the undocumented/illegal immigrants become documented/legal, and if 0% of 0% vote, the result is still a landslide for the Democrats. The real changes begin to happen if you adjust the population growth rates of the legal/documented citizens and voters. But those patterns/behaviours are a lot more difficult to adjust since you can’t legislate people to have more babies.

All in all a fascinating piece from the New York Times. The controls are fairly intuitive, drag sliders to adjust percentages. The sliders have clear labels. And the results on the map are instantaneous. Perhaps the only quirk is that the ranges of the colours are not detailed. But that might be a function of forecasting the data so far into the future and having growing ranges of certainty.

Credit for the piece goes to Matthew Bloch, Josh Keller, and Nate Silver.

Asian Immigration

Today I have more immigration-related information graphics and data visualisation for you. Earlier this week the New York Times looked at immigration to California, but this time the focus was on Asian population growth and not Hispanic. The graphic here supports an article looking at where the growth has been focused in California. And given that emphasis, the map accompanying the article makes sense. And as the reader can clearly see, much of that growth has been centred in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County.

Credit for the piece goes to Haeyoun Park.

Integrating Latino Immigrants into the United States

Following from yesterday’s post about the undocumented immigrant paths to citizenship, today’s post is a graphic from a New York Times article that looks at the integration of Latinos into the United States vis-a-vis all immigrants.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.

The Universe Keeps Getting Bigger

The Kepler observatory is responsible for finding Earth-like planets in distant solar systems. It was launched only in 2009, but has been incredibly successful. Earlier this week scientists announced the discovery of Kepler 62, a star system that has five planets. Two of those planets exist within the Goldilocks zone, where conditions are just right for habitable planets (for Earth-like organisms) to form and exist. Of course, not all planets in such zones are habitable, look at Venus and Mars for examples. But still, the news is quite significant.

Over at the New York Times, Jonathan Corum plotted all the data on all the systems so far discovered by Kepler, including that new information on Kepler 62. The result is a mesmerising view of star systems beyond our own. The stars are planets are enlarged for visibility and the orbits are made a bit more circular, but the overview is still fantastic.

The chart shows the relative sizes of the stars and their temperatures and allows you to compare the orbits of the planets so far known. You can also sort the chart either by size or time of discovery. It also shows the relative times of the planets’ orbits. That is, they move…

Fans of this will remember that in 2011, the New York Times used a similar, albeit static, method to explain the discovery of planets at Kepler 20, whose planets all orbit closer to their star than Mercury to ours.

Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum.

Terrorism in the United States

Terrorism is not new to the United States. As this graphic from the New York Times shows, even in recent decades, we experienced quite a lot of it. In 1970 there were over 400 attacks. However, since 2001, the United States has seen far fewer attacks. Fortunately the Boston Marathon bombing is not as bad as it could have been. But even then, thankfully the bombing is a relative anomaly.

Incidence of Terrorist Attacks in the United States

Credit for the piece goes to the graphics department of the Times.

The Boston Marathon Bombing in More Detail

Today’s post comes from the New York Times and offers more detail on the twin terror bombings Monday. While the topic is surely gruesome, the interactive graphic is clean without the inclusion of photos or videos of the violence. It focuses on the facts without the fanfare or sensationalism to which we are accustomed from a media that too often needs it to draw and sustain viewership. A sober and informative piece from the New York Times.

Credit for the piece goes to the graphics department of the Times.

How Dragonflies Hunt

Today’s post is certainly smaller, but it’s always interesting to see how infographics and information design can help us better understand science and nature. This is a piece from the New York Times that illustrates how a dragonfly hunts its prey, fruit flies. Instead of flying straight at the fruit fly, the dragonfly plots a course that keeps it on the same line of sight with the fruit fly. The dragonfly often captures its prey where those two lines intersect, as show below.

What is really nice about this graphic is the dots that mark out 1/20 second intervals and allow you to plot the course of both animals with respect to each other. The annotations of course explain what is going on, for example when lines intersect by the dragonfly misses.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.

Cartograms

Continuing this week’s map theme, we have an example of a cartogram from the New York Times. This piece supplements an article about how some manufacturing companies are starting to look away from China as a place for their facilities. There are two maps, the first (not shown here) looks at economic output overall. The second (below) takes that output and accounts for population.

Hexagons are used instead of the more familiar squares to represent 500,000 people and the colour is the GDP per capita. The text accompanying the graphic explains how this is a measure of economic potential being (or not being) realised. But what the hexagons allow the map to do is better represent the shapes of the countries. Squares, more common in cartograms, create awkward box-like outlines of countries. That would be fine if countries were often shaped like squares, but they are not.

I am not often a fan of cartograms, but I find this one well executed and the annotations and explanatory text make what might otherwise be confusing far simpler to understand. All in all, a solid piece.

Credit for the piece goes to Mike Bostock and Keith Bradsher.

Choropleth Maps

Keeping with maps, they can be useful, but all too often people fall back upon them because it is a quick and easy way of displaying data for geographic entities. This graphic from the New York Times on ADHD is not terribly complex, but it uses a map effectively.

The article discusses how ADHD rates among states vary, but are still higher in the South. The map supports that argument. Consider how it would be different if every other state were darkened to a different shade of purple. There would be neither rhyme nor reason as to why the map was being used.

A subtle point worth noting is that only the states falling into the highest bin are labelled. Those are the states that best support the story. The remainder of the states are left unlabelled so as not to distract from the overall piece.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.

Proposed Expansion of Massachusetts Railway Network

When we talk about new rail projects, or even highway or airport expansions, we like to include maps of new routes and destinations. In that sense this map from the New York Times is not new. However, we often forget in such visualisations that we have the opportunity to add layers of information that show why these expansions are beneficial.

Proposed Massachusetts railway network expansion

Here, note in particular how the proposed improvement projects link the dense corridor of urban settlements stretching from Boston through Worcester to Springfield. Additional lines connect more distant southerly cities such as Fall River to Boston. These might normally be seen as dots at ends of a line, but by showing the density of the population in these corridors, readers can understand how the proposed lines might benefit more people than just those living at the dots.

Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.