Fair Warning - Automated cars, ageing Japan, and German migration
Hi! I completely forgot to do this last week because I was busy learning how to play the piano, and yesterday I was baby wrangling. And nobody tells you this, but it turns out baby wrangling is really time-consuming and tiring.
A couple of weeks ago I was a guest judge for the Iron Viz Europe contest, run by Tableau. I'm really happy with the three finalists (all of them are linked to in that blogpost) but most of the submissions were pretty fascinating.
Congratulations to the finalists and good luck in Berlin ;)
On the home front
Council elections: 'Not enough' women and minorities stand — www.bbc.co.uk
This was written before the local elections took place. "The average councillor is 59, white and probably called David or John." Genuinely maddening and depressing.
UK local elections: what we learnt
Local elections are over, hooray. The FT has five takeaways in this piece. Quite astonishing that the two main parties have gone from having a combined share of 82% of the vote in 2017, to just 56% two years later.
(£)
This, from the Guardian, is a really clever, succinct illustration of how the divide in the UK is not so much about south vs north (as we often assume, quite lazily) but about London vs literally anywhere else in the country.
Apparently people care about the Royal baby and what it will be called (seriously, do they not have more interesting hobbies?) - I quite liked this name chart from Alex:
Over the pond
Self-driving cars: Who to save, who to sacrifice? — ici.radio-canada.ca
This is Canadian but I'm putting it here because it's my newsletter and I make the rules. This fab article is about self-driving cars and how we make moral choices. Includes some revelatory survey data on how different countries approach moral/ethical decisions, and cute 8-bit graphics.
A Better Way To Think About This Month’s Jobs Numbers
This is an interesting (ongoing) explanation of each month's job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are confidence intervals for each set of numbers, and each month is revised twice, and annual figures are also revised. Also, the way unemployment is measured is not really reflective of how we would generally conceive of unemployment. Incredibly nerdy but useful!?
If you're an outdoorsy type and live in or travel to North America you might find this Forest Service map useful: Tells you where hiking trails, campsites, fishing spots etc are. Which is pretty cool.
Elsewhere
The million who left / Die Millionen, die gingen — www.zeit.de
If you can read German this will read better than the shonky translation I have, but I absolutely love this from Zeit Online. They decided to look at the movement of people since the reunification of Germany. It's very interesting, particularly how there are now more people moving east than west.
Everyone knows (surely) that Japan has the highest percentage of old people. In 2005 there were fewer births than deaths in Japan. This trend is expected to affect Germany, China and Italy in the coming decades, so what can they learn from Japan as it tries to tackle the crisis of labour shortages, unclaimed urns, and a shrinking population? Great Reuters article here.
Odds and ends
Missing Numbers — missingnumbers.org
Missing Numbers is a project about the gaps in government data by Anna Powell Smith. Thought some of you might have ideas for things the government should collect but doesn't currently.
Why xkcd-style graphs are important
This post by Chris Stucchio (from 2014) argues that xkcd-style graphs (ie, hand-drawn) work when you encounter the "phenomenon of people misinterpreting back of the envelope calculations as precise computations". Here is a line I can get down with: "No one reads disclaimers, caveats, or explanations of graphs. They look at pictures."
How do you create a T-Rex using a map? Like this, apparently (thank you TerribleMaps for all your work).
Lastly, it's nothing to do with data and everything to do with what it means to be human, and coming to terms with death and grief and making something beautiful from it. I cried the whole way through. A genuinely heartbreaking but beautifully written piece from Jayson Greene's forthcoming memoir, At Once We Saw Stars: "There are things you see with your body, not with your eyes. Stepping away, I feel something evaporate, a quantum of my soul, perhaps, burning up on contact."
That's everything this week. Hope you didn't miss Fair Warning/me too much last week. If you enjoyed this issue, please forward it to people you think will like it, consider buying me a coffee or supporting Fair Warning on Patreon from as little as $4 a month. See you next week!