Tag: politics

  • Senate Polarity

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Earlier this month I posted about how the New York Times looked at the polarisation of the US Senate. Now the National Journal has another, similar visualisation attempting to explain the political gridlock that was picked up by the Atlantic. For those wondering, the National Journal ranks senators on their conservativeness–liberalness by their votes and that…

  • Politics Moves Further to the Extremes

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    In case you were wondering, yes, Virginia, politics in the United States are becoming more polarised. Olympia Snowe, the moderate Republican senator from Maine, is not running for re-election. And so the Senate is left without one more centrist counterweight to an extreme. To try and show how extreme, this graphic from the New York…

  • Examining the World’s Response to the Somalia Famine

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Somalia is beset by a bevy of problems; from an Islamist insurgency that holds great swathes of the south, to the de facto independent regions of Somaliland and Puntland in the north, to the pirates operating off the coast, to the barely functional government in Mogadishu that controls only sections of the capital through the…

  • Presidential Popularity

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    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Presidents’ Day is actually Washington’s Birthday. That makes sense when you consider how Washington is still a much beloved president. And according to a recent survey, the most favoured president. What is worth nothing is that most Americans know little of the 19th century presidents, save the big names like Lincoln, Grant, and (Teddy) Roosevelt.…

  • The Crisis in Syria

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    The crisis in Syria now resembles more of a civil war. The UN General Assembly has condemned the conflict and passed a resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step aside along with a host of other steps to resolve the conflict. However, nothing can happen until the Security Council agrees on a measure, which is…

  • The 2013 Budget Proposal Visualisation Comparison

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Yesterday’s post was about the administration’s 2013 budget proposal as visualised by the New York Times. This morning we have a brief comparison to the visualisation of the Washington Post. The main visualisation shows spending by department compared against revenue, the difference between being the grey box of deficit. Of note is that this piece…

  • 2013 Budget Proposal

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Normally, I look forward to the release of the president’s budget proposed budget—fully understanding that it will never pass as proposed. We get to see lots of visualisations trying to show that we really do spend quite a lot on defence. And an awful lot on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And a little bit…

  • Adding Guided Context to Maps

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Maps are cool. They show the geographic distribution of data. And that is fantastic if there is a story in said distribution. But even if there is a story, sometimes given both the scale of the map and the amount of data encoded in the map, how could you possibly expect to find the story?…

  • Comparing the (Display of) Results in Colorado

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Mitt Romney lost badly last night. No way around that. But as I watched the results come in through various sources, I noticed two interesting design decisions that made me think; one from the Guardian (the British perspective), and the other from the New York Times. Using only Colorado as an example, here is the…

  • Cities Split Apart

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    I like maps. Ever since I was kid. This post is less of an interesting graphic, chart, or what have you, but instead to point you to an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times. Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps wrote the piece, which is about cities split apart by political boundaries.