Fair Warning - Inequality, populism, and battleground Texas
Well, hey there! After a two-week hiatus due to being in New York and then at NICAR in Orange County (I thought it was LA and it turns out I've been lying to everyone), I am back, kind of! When you read this I will hopefully be wandering around Paris, but I felt I owed you all and so I wrote this IN ADVANCE. What! Brief write-up of NICAR here but I want it noted that I met some very excellent people while I was in the US too. If that's you, 👋.
Soundtrack to this week: Depeche Mode (OK, it's only one song, but it's the best version of the best song - you lucky things)
On the home front
Right to Buy homes made £2.8m in profit 'in weeks' — www.bbc.co.uk
This is a really good story hard-won by going through a lot of data. For the non-Brits among you, it's a big deal because Right to Buy was a Thatcher policy designed to help council tenants buy their own homes. They could buy at a huge discount, and was never designed to just help people earn money off a property. So... yeah.
By 43% to 38% Britons want MPs to vote to against a Brexit delay
Running away to some other country and marrying someone I only vaguely like seems like a good option sometimes. Just saying.
Over the pond
Why Texas Is Nearing Battleground Status (It’s Not Just About Beto) — www.nytimes.com
I don't know about you but I am really excited about the idea of Texas as a battleground state. That would be mad.
This is a very cool exploration of inequality by places (coffee shops, museums, schools) as opposed to areas. It's only been done in Boston so far, but researchers are hoping to broaden it out to other cities.
Sometimes you see a thing that you feel like you ought to dislike because it completely disregards convention, but... It somehow just works. This Washington Post feature about fentanyl deaths is a great piece of work on a terrible situation in the US. About halfway down there are small multiple charts that create a map. I think I have seen people attempt to do this before but with this data it's really effective.
Elsewhere...
These five maps reveal how transit and geography can shape a city — www.nationalgeographic.com
This is a fairly simple piece about how different cities grew and spread over the years to become what they are today. Railways and roads have helped in different ways. I just love how pretty and mesmerising these are.
EU Elections: Will Populists Win or Have They Peaked?
This is somewhat reassuring ahead of the European elections in May. Other than Salvini in Italy, it seems there's little appetite for populism across Europe. Nice stat: "Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, there’s been an average 8.5-point increase in the share of people saying EU membership is a good thing."
This visualisation allows you to explore "the DNA of a good government" by looking at different views of the same data for lots of countries. There's more to it than meets the eye (you can change the scatterplot axes, click on the countries to get individual data points, etc) but am mostly flummoxed by the ranking given that Liechstenstein doesn't have much data and is... top?
This word map of emotions not in the english language
Oh, I like this a lot. I don't speak two languages (just stupid phrases in about seven) but I know a few polyglots and sometimes there are untranslatable emotions or feelings, and I think this does a good job of 'mapping' them. My favourite Welsh words are almost untranslatable: Hiraeth and cwtch.
Odds and ends
Leonardo DiCaprio Refuses to Date a Woman Over 25 — www.reddit.com
I know that he has his pick of partners but it's extremely gross, sorry.
🚨Men: Don't do this, it makes you gross. [Not that sorry after all, I guess.]
Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator
Genuinely can't remember where I got this from but this is helpful if you want to test your colour palettes out on a data vis or some other image you're making. It has different types of colour blindness in there too.
Even After 31 Trillion Digits, We’re Still No Closer To The End Of Pi
Emma Haruka Iwao, who works at Google, has found nearly 9 trillion new digits of pi. I am slightly in awe and slightly just... wondering whether she enjoys her life as much as the rest of us.
This is so beautiful! It's a visualisation of women who work in data viz, how long they've done it, what they studied, and what their hopes and ambitions are, etc. It's unbearably cute.
Here is the probability you will break up with your partner
"Tell us how long you've been with your partner, and we will tell you how likely you are to break up based on historical data from the US."
LOVE IS DEAD. 💔
This compares the top (I guess? Rooney, Messi, Ronaldo, etc) footballers by the number of goals and their age. I quite like how this looks actually. [NB: The music is stupid. Turn it off.]
Lastly... A quick note to say that if you are a Tableau user then you may want to enter into the Iron Viz Europe competition. For which I am a guest judge! Get your entries in before April 7th. I'm excited to see what people come up with.
That’s it for this week! If you are enjoying reading Fair Warning, please forward it to people who would also like it, encourage friends to subscribe to it, buy me a coffee to say thanks, or support Fair Warning on Patreon if you’re so inclined. I’m Soph And I'm Always On Twitter @SophieWarnes.