politics – Page 24 – Coffee Spoons

Wealth and Education

Today’s post looks at education across a set of 65 countries from a standardised test backed by the OECD, basically a group of wealthy countries. The test results found that some poor countries have surprisingly good education systems whereas some of the world’s wealthiest countries—here’s looking at you, United States—perform poorly. The Huffington Post created this graphic to plot the data.

I really enjoy this piece. It plots each income decile’s results, blocks the countries into OECD members versus their partners, and then each country’s average socioeconomic status is shown as being above or below the OECD average. This is the type of piece I see as a static image that I would want to see made interactively—though I fully understand how difficult and time-consuming that can be—so that I could begin to filter and re-arrange the data. Could discoveries be made by organising countries by geographic regions? Could one just look at the top or bottom deciles?

Credit for the piece goes to Jan Diehm.

Views on Gay Marriage Around the World

If you have been living under a rock, Sochi, Russia is hosting the winter Olympics this year. A year in which the Russian government passed legislation banning not same-sex relationships but advocacy for said relationships. Several countries, including the United States, take issue with the legislation. But this graphic from the National Journal hints that in order to reverse such barriers to same-sex marriages, the United States and like-minded societies have a long way to go to convince not just Russians, but many other societies across the world.

Credit for the piece goes to Brian McGill.

Traffic Jam on the George Washington

A lot of people have been talking about Bridgegate, a scandal in New Jersey wherein the governor’s office allegedly abused its power to negatively impact the residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey. What actually happened for a few days this past fall? The Washington Post uses aerial photography and illustration to diagram the normal traffic flow and the flow during the traffic “study”.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

Brand New Year, Same Old Politics

Today’s piece comes from this past weekend. The New York Times looked at how states fell on various politically sensitive issues, e.g. abortion and same-sex marriage, depending upon the political control of the executive and legislative functions of each state. In other words, which states have passed legislation to regulate abortion or same-sex marriage? States controlled by Democrats, or states controlled by Republicans?

The overall lay of the land and two issues

I am not terribly keen on the clustered bubbles. Showing the population of each state could be handled better by different chart forms. But to a certain extent in this piece, the population figures are secondary to the aggregate of people living in blue or red states. And in that case, while you cannot easily visualise the number of people living in the aggregates, you can at least get a feel for which group is home to more people.

Credit for the piece goes to Haeyoun Park, Jeremy Ashkenas, and Mike Bostock.

North Jersey Traffic

For those of you unaware of the shenanigans going on in New Jersey, this won’t make any sense. But for those that are, it sucks to be a commuter in North Jersey as this comic map illustrates.

Credit for the piece goes to Ruben Bolling.

Tracking You While You Text

Today’s post comes from the Washington Post, which looks at further revelations about the NSA surveillance programme. Specifically, the Post details how the NSA tracks Americans by what is called co-traveler analytics. The piece does a really nice job of explaining how the tracking works through illustrative examples.

Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.

The Next Cold War?

The New York Times has a nice piece about the Arctic, which is increasingly fought over by the nations north of the Arctic Circle. Maps like these are always opportunities I enjoy to see the world in an infographic that is not a standard projection, e.g. Mercator or Robinson. The slight change in fill or opacity also serves to highlight the focus of the piece on the area north of the Arctic Circle while areas even more distant slowly fade to white.

Credit for the piece goes to Baden Copeland and Derek Watkins.

Old Healthcare Policy Renewal

Let’s start this week off with cartograms. Sometimes I like the idea, sometimes not so much. Here is a case where I really do not care for the New York Times’ visualisation of the data. Probably because the two cartograms, a before and after of health policy renewals, do not really allow for a great side-by-side comparison. I imagine there is probably a way of condensing all of that information into a single chart or graphic component.

Credit for the piece goes to Keith Collins, Josh Katz, Katie Thomas, Archie Tse, and Karen Yourish.

Explaining Why Some People Are Losing Their Health Insurance Plans

I have received a few questions in the non-blog world about why certain people have been receiving notices in the post that they are about to lose their insurance plans. The short answer for many of those people is that they likely bought individual, private plans and those plans fall short of the new minimum requirements. But, if you are not satisfied with that explanation, the New York Times does a much better job explaining it than I ever could. It is a piece worth a quick read.

Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Alicia Parlapiano, and Karen Yourish.

Scale of Syria’s Refugees

So that civil war in Syria thing, yeah, it’s still going on, folks. And lots of people—7,000,000 of them—have been forced to flee to either external or internal locations. Al Jazeera has attempted to put that number into context for Americans using US census data and maps.

Here is a look at both Philadelphia and Chicago for comparison’s sake. The interactive application has a few pre-selected options, or you can find your own US locale.

Syrian refugees based on Philadelphia's population — Syrian refugees based on Philadelphia’s population

Syrian refugees based on Chicago's population — Syrian refugees based on Chicago’s population

Credit for the piece goes to Michael Keller.