Fair Warning - Lunar missions, President Clinton, and Amazon at 25
Hello! Fair Warning is back! Last week I thought I would be able to get a short version off on the Sunday before flying to Malaga for the European Data and Computational Journalism Conference. But in between preparing for a gig, having my family stay the weekend, and flying to Spain, I had no time to work on it.
The good news is that the conference was brilliant, people liked our talk about chatbots, and I met interesting people and learned a few things.
For the first time ever, I'm writing this in the hipster coffee shop in my building. Proof!
Over the pond
If everyone had voted, Hillary Clinton would probably be president — www.economist.com
"Republicans owe much of their electoral success to liberals who don’t vote"
*screams into abyss*
How 24,000 Tweets Tell You What the Democratic Presidential Candidates Care About
This is such a great piece of analysis by Bloomberg, and so beautifully presented. You can look at specific topics over time, or look closely at what specific candidates have been tweeting about. A fair few of them are concerned about social issues, but, Tulsi Gabbard, for instance, is more prolific on the topic of foreign policy.
Why Nasa’s next Moon mission can’t be an Apollo retread
As a space nerd this is a really cool read for the content ("why can't we just go back to the moon" is a sensible question with a good, if complex, answer) but also there's a nice graphic showing the visual history of lunar missions. I didn't know that most early lunar missions didn't even escape Earth's orbit!
No One Picks Up the Phone, but Which Online Polls Are the Answer?
This is a really long and tbh, overly wordy piece on online polls vs traditional polling. YouGov comes out of this very well because of their methodology in weighting polls. But the upshot (hehe) is: "In general, the simple solution for these unproven online polls is to average them, rather than pick apart the methodological details of individual surveys." BE SENSIBLE ABOUT POLLS.
Are extraterrestrials extra patriotic?
This is incredible. UFO sightings in the US peak on the 4th July, Independence Day.
"Intoxication may cause some to confuse celebratory fireworks with alien aircraft."
US airports by state in 1776. *Sniggers*
Elsewhere
Increase in rents in Germany — www.zeit.de
The translated headline made no sense, but this (quite old - from January) piece about rents in Germany is nice, I mostly just really like the maps that Zeit Online make. Thing is, I had thought that rents in Germany or at least Berlin were capped...? *Waits for someone to email and correct*
Mapping every vote: extremely detailed maps on the 2019 election
This features two - very different - interactive maps based on the Australian 2019 election. Personally I really like dot density maps so obviously I prefer the second to the first. Australian politics seem too complex or somehow passes me by so I can't really comment on the actual results.
One family’s journey of 600 kilometers
A nice scrollytelling/map-based visualisation of the journey of one family who escaped the violence of the Central African Republic.
Odds and ends
Amazon at 25: The story of a giant — www.bbc.co.uk
The stats in this are quite astonishing really. Amazon has only been around for 25 years but completely dominates some markets, and is worth nearly $1tn. That's a... ridiculous amount of money.
Differences Between Women and Men’s Everyday with Kids
This makes use of the American Time Use Survey to show how people's lives change after having children. Women are affected the most - they spend way more time than men looking after children, and way less of their time working. Men see slight changes in their time, but not so dramatic.
Nice that we have it cool inside. Only: It makes it even warmer outside
When I was in Malaga I wondered about the air conditioning units on the roof of the university, and whether they were just generating more heat. This is an interesting look at the impact of air con units on the environment. Note: This might need translating :)
Bad chart of the week
I say this with some trepidation because I actually quite like sankey diagrams and I also like FiveThirtyEight a lot but this particular vis seems far too messy.
FiveThirtyEight used a sankey diagram to show where voters shifted their loyalty between the debates - fair enough. But there are so many Dem candidates that it's extremely hard to see what's going on beyond Joe Biden leaking votes to Kamala Harris.
It was criticised on DataIsUgly because it's a bit of a mess, but seems to have divided opinion. I'm going to say this is not a 'bad' chart but perhaps not the best execution of a really good idea. The data is certainly interesting!
That's everything for this issue. I couldn't find many UK based pieces, so if you found any, please do share! As always, it would be great if you could forward this to interested friends/family/colleagues. Also, you can support Fair Warning on Patreon or buy me a coffee if you enjoy reading it most weeks.