Fair Warning - Hurricane maps, Siberian wildfires, and HIV
Well hello there. I got super busy last week and didn't have time to put together a newsletter.
This week I did what I think in technical terms is called Absolutely Smashing It and did a 5k parkrun, made a new parkrun PB, broke multiple Strava records, and I did it in ridiculous glasses [CW: this is a link to a tweet of my face]. I'm pleased.
Unfortunately this is going to be the last newsletter for a few weeks (so it's a bumper one ^_^) because I'm going away for a bit. Good news for Patrons is I've paused payment for this month so don't worry about paying and not getting anything.
Lastly - I have a question for you. If you were starting out learning data journalism, what would you want to know? Please contribute to the discussion on Twitter or reply to this email.
On the home front
What happened this week, uh... Who knows, really?
Britons make worst tourists, say Britons (and Spaniards and Germans)
Can't say I disagree. British tourists are bad. Embarrassingly bad. To the point that I will sometimes pretend I'm not.
How Corporate Britain Hides Thousands of Sex Discrimination Cases — www.bloomberg.com
This is an excellent story by Bloomberg - they did some digging into a public but largely unnoticed database of sex discrimination legal cases. Some 61% of these cases in the last 2.5 years have been dropped. Lots of detail here.
Seven in 10 hospital trusts failing to meet safety standards
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) says that staff shortages are putting patients at risk. More info in this piece from the Guardian, based on analysing inspection reports from the CQC.
Over the pond
Here’s Who Owns the Most Land in America — www.bloomberg.com
This is great. "The 100 largest private landowners in America own about 2% of the whole country." I don't actually know who Ted Turner is but he owns the largest private herd of animals in the WORLD and if that's not impressive, I don't know what is.
Those Hurricane Maps Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean — www.nytimes.com
This is a great explainer of the hurricane cone, by Alberto Cairo. The maps are designed to help people prepare but they are misunderstood all the time.
Minnesota county sending at-risk kids to other states despite concerns about care
This reminded me of the Guardian's piece about bussing America's homeless around. One county in Minnesota is sending at-risk children to juvenile correctional facilities in different states, some where there are historical allegations of sexual abuse and improper behaviour by staff. Great.
Mapping the strain on our water supply — www.washingtonpost.com
This is quite interesting - also includes data about countries other than the US. It's about water supply vs demand, and 'water stress'. The state experiencing most water stress is New Mexico, meaning if there was an extended drought, the state would struggle to cope with it.
Trump Says Mar-A-Lago Can’t Find US Workers To Hire. New Documents Show Dozens Applied.
Missed this when it was published. Trump has implied he has no choice but to hire foreign workers for his resorts. Buzzfeed found that almost 60 US residents applied for jobs at Trump resorts between 2014 and 2018, and only one looks like they've been hired.
Elsewhere...
Wildfires: The fury of summer in Siberia — graphics.reuters.com
"In June alone these wildfires emitted 50 megatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, this is the equivalent of Sweden’s annual total CO2 emissions. This is more than was released by Arctic fires in the same month between 2010 and 2018 combined."
Maps of Amazon fires show why we’re thinking about them wrong — www.washingtonpost.com
An interesting different perspective (of course, an opinion) on the fires in the Amazon.
In Russia, the three leading regions in terms of mortality from HIV have changed
Had to Google translate this because I am an idiot monoglot with only the loosest grasp on another language. This line shocked me: "The mortality rate from HIV [in the Kemerovo Region] is 65.1 cases per 100 thousand inhabitants - this is more than from all alcohol poisoning, suicides, homicides, drowning and road accidents combined."
In China, bad research can be worth gold — www.nzz.ch
Another non-English article. But I thought it was quite interesting as I've not seen data analysis on research like this before.
"For a country that is closed to the internet, the quality of OSM data in North Korea is extraordinary: 324,415 data points drawn by 889 contributors since 2007." Cool huh?
Odds and ends
I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me. — www.nytimes.com
This was popular last week and it's not hard to see why. This fascinating forensic look at an individual's activity online is food for thought: Who tracks us, who shares information, how much do they really know? The irony, of course, is that the NYT has recently forced all readers to sign up to read articles for free. Bit pot / kettle.
Gender-neutral bathrooms can save women from waiting forever in line
This is great by Mona Chalabi on a thing that annoys me in most public places: "Women wait an average of six minutes to go while men wait just 11 seconds" Grrr.
Drowning in plastic — graphics.reuters.com
There's a slightly horrifying [I opened the tab, forgot about it, went back, and experienced browser-based claustrophobia] animation at the top of this which shows how many plastic bottles have been bought since you opened the page. I guess I am a little sceptical as to how accurate these visualisations of the accumulation of plastic bottles really are - they are extremely stark.
All possible one-way, directional MTA train line transfers
Pointless (?) visualisation of NYC subway transfers, but it's nice to look at. I find these kind of charts visually appealing but useless for getting any insight whatsoever.
Mentions of 'recession' in financial news websites headlines vs SP500
Erk. (Via Reddit)
Tutorials and learning resources
A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R — cedricscherer.netlify.com
I use ggplot2 to draft visualisations and share my ideas with my team so if you do that kind of thing too, or aspire to... This looks like an awesome tutorial for learning how to use ggplot2.
Freely available programming books
Huge list of free programming books you can use, hosted on GitHub. Useful if you want to learn a new language or whatever. Includes actual different languages, not just English versions! Knock yourself out!
Awesome public datasets: A topic-centric list of HQ open datasets
Does what it says on the tin, hopefully you can find something here for a new project. :)
New D3 tutorial by Amelia Wattenberger. I have not looked at it properly and I'm not a D3 nerd, but it looks cool at first glance.
Dataviz Books Everyone Should Read
Just in case you are stuck and wanted some suggestions for a new addition to your bookshelf.
"So, you want to learn statistics but you’re not sure where to start? Don’t worry." Nice selection of learning resources here from Brandon Rohrer.
Bad chart of the week
Well, there are two. I'm putting this one here because I think it's poking fun at pie charts, and also I love Shakespeare:
A genuinely bad chart here from viz.wtf that is confusing because there are three dimensions that need plotting (time, area, percent) and it's been presented in a weird way that isn't easy to read. What are we meant to take from this? Because all I see is the area with the highest % of immigrants, but I suspect the story is about the time period in which people emigrated, ie more people before 1981, with it increasing in recent years.
So that's the end of the bumper edition. I'll be back in a few weeks so hopefully this will be enough to tide you over until then :)
As always, thanks for subscribing and reading - if you enjoyed it, please forward to others or encourage them to subscribe. You can also buy me a coffee or sign up as a Patron to say thanks.