Fair Warning - Climate change, beer, and wolves
Hi! I found out this week that my submission has been accepted for the European Data Journalism Conference which is quite exciting. As a result, in July I will be in Malaga with a couple of colleagues talking to people about chatbots. I hope I will see some of you there.
Over the pond
The Demographics of Others — flowingdata.com
This is from last year so I may have linked to it before; nonetheless I love this succinct summary of the different demographics of the US. Pick a group of people that you are interested in (sex, age, race) and see how many are married, have kids, their income, employment, etc.
Mapping America’s wicked weather and deadly disasters
THE MAPS IN THIS ARE BEAUTIFUL. Tim, who made them, even explains how he made them on Twitter. Stunning work!
Louisiana Unveils Ambitious Plan to Help People Get Out of the Way of Climate Change
This is super interesting. Louisiana is the first state to come up with a plan to help its most at-risk communities. The recommendations are: to invest in 'floating' services; for receiving communities to be better prepared for people to move there; targeted investment in transport links and infrastructure for lower risk areas. Nice maps and graphics too.
Is It Better to Rent or Buy? — www.nytimes.com
I love this calculator by the NYT from 2014. I used it to try to understand whether I was better off renting or buying (I bought) but also quite aware that it's based on US figures, so I don't know how different it would be if made for the UK.
Is There a Connection Between Undocumented Immigrants and Crime?
New analysis looking at the (statistical) relationship between different crimes and undocumented immigrants shows that um, there is no relationship at all. In fact in some cases it seems like having more undocumented immigrants = crime goes down.
Elsewhere
Where populists trumpet in Europe — www.spiegel.de
Good from Der Spiegel on where populist (anti-establishment) parties are popular, across Europe.
Das geteilte Land / The shared land
Another really nice interactive from Zeit Online about the differences between East and West Germany. It's fascinating to me how different they are, even now.
More and more wolves howl in Switzerland - and thus more and more Valais cattle ranchers — www.nzz.ch
I like this Swiss data journalism story about wolves in Switzerland and the farmers who hate them. Nice graphics.
Brussels - A lovely melting-pot
Cute interactive showing where residents in Brussels live, and where they are from. I didn't realise that Brussels has the second highest proportion of residents from foreign origins (after Dubai - around 60%).
This sobering map shows the distribution of floating plastic in the oceans based on a recent study. Around 268,000 tonnes (which is honestly far too much for my brain to fully comprehend) of floating plastic debris was estimated to be in the oceans. Ugh.
Odds and ends
Why beer snobs guzzle lagers they claim to dislike — www.economist.com
This is kind of interesting analysis based on the words used to describe different beers and their ratings. Basically the more common / mainstream a drink, the lower it gets rated? There is probably a better takeaway from all of this, but I don't like or understand beer until I'm a few cocktails in, and I am stone cold sober right now.
A report showing the analysis and results of trying to figure out which Reddit users were actually 'Russian bots'. By scraping comments and posts by users and running textual analysis on them - as well as looking at post times - you can clearly see different patterns between normal users and fake ones. Link to Github page is here if you want to try it out.
How unprecedented is the decline of “Game of Thrones”? — www.economist.com
Perhaps by the time you read this you will have seen the Game of Thrones finale. Is it as bad as everyone fears? Despite being one of the most consistently highly rated shows, the ratings have fallen off a cliff this season, and people expect it to get worse.
This is a cool university website where you can get to grips with statistical concepts in a nice interactive playground. Stuff like this is really good, I think, because it allows people to learn and engage with educational material on their own terms.
That's everything for this week. If you're interested in sponsoring Fair Warning for a while, please get in touch. Otherwise, you can buy me a coffee to show your appreciation for the newsletter, or sign up to become a patron. See you next week!