Fair Warning - Passwords, trifectas, and musical politics
Hello hello! I'm writing this on a Saturday night halfway through a can of Rekorderlig so please excuse any typos... ;)
Some non-data things that caught my eye this week:
I'm very much enjoying Dan Sinker's extremely useful and colourful impeachment.fyi newsletter. I don't need to frantically try to figure out what everyone on Twitter is angry about anymore.
I'm obsessed with Schitts Creek (again) right now, and rewatching the whole thing. I'm slowly trying to convince all my friends to watch it (that includes you, hi)... In the meantime I will never get over how utterly wonderful this scene is [Don't watch if you haven't seen season 4!]
I had no idea Freddie Prinze Jr could get so passionately angry about Star Wars. In fact, I'll be honest: I straight up forgot he existed, since the last time I heard his name was around 2002 and involved the Scooby Doo movie.
Jared Leto appears to have started a cult(?) and I feel kind of uneasy about it actually.
Prince Andrew is, remarkably, still unrepentant about being buddies with Jeffrey Epstein but admits that perhaps staying with a known sex offender was "the wrong thing to do". The privilege is strong with this one.
On the home front
Half of disability benefits appeals won in tribunal court — www.bbc.co.uk
In news that will not shock anyone who has been paying attention, it turns out that the process for assessing people for benefits only takes into account external assessors' opinions of their fitness for work, ignoring claimants' evidence. Which means one in two claimants win their case on appeal.
Has anyone ever thought that maybe we should just burn the whole system to the ground and start again?
The Times did some cool analysis (that looks suspiciously like something I put in the last newsletter), about which towns had been given extra funding. Here are the findings in a nice little graphic:
These Are the Brexit Battlegrounds That Will Decide the U.K. Election
Make of this what you will. All I'm saying is... "The first December election in almost a century" *weeps silently*
Over the pond
Democrats are dominating state-level races — www.washingtonpost.com
Super interesting article on 'trifectas' - where one party controls both Senate and House, and the governor is in the same party. Never heard that before! This piece goes into a lot of detail about how democrats are winning or breaking trifectas, and where they could win or break trifectas next year.
Why Obama-Trump swing voters like heavy metal — www.economist.com
This analysis of Americans' musical tastes is quite interesting. Country is a good predictor of a conservative, whereas hip-hop is a good predictor for liberalism.
Roger Stone and Everyone Charged in the 2016 Election Investigations
Another one bites the dust! Roger Stone is the sixth Trump adviser who has been found or pleaded guilty of crimes stemming from the Mueller investigation. This NYT article looks at all of them. For a guy who surrounds himself with "the best people" it seems like Trump has bad judgement, huh.
Elsewhere...
Australia bushfires: State of emergency — graphics.reuters.com
Interesting satellite pics and maps here of bushfires across the eastern coast of Australia. The fires have started happening after three years of drought across New South Wales.
Love this piece interweaving human stories and data visualisations to explain something really important. "The fast-warming Sea of Okhotsk, wedged between Russia and Japan, is a cautionary tale of the far-reaching consequences when climate dominoes begin to fall."
Odds and ends
Visualizing my own post-breakup habit changes — www.reddit.com
Awwww. [Note: Not mine, the random guy who posted this to Reddit. I never want to visualise the ups and downs of my love life thank you v much]
I Turned My Depression Into Data. Here's the Moment Therapy Saved My Life.
As someone who has suffered for years with mental health issues (depression, and less frequently, anxiety) I totally get how physically tracking your behaviour or state of mind might help you to spot patterns, seek help, and eventually start feeling better. Really glad for this guy that he did this.
Kind of cool interactive look at how most passwords are constructed, using analysis of passwords. You can also search for your passwords to see if they have come up in the database (info.graphics says they don't record what is submitted in this box but I'm not taking responsibility for that...) - if they appear there, you should probably change it!
150 years of Nature: a data graphic charts our evolution — www.nature.com
Nice analysis of Nature's archive which shows how contributors and content in the journal has changed over 150 years. You can see how different scientific fields' focus changed, and how collaboration on papers has grown in recent years.
Insulting Tweets by Donald J. Trump
It's a bar chart race! Of insulting Trump tweets! The content you never knew you needed! I'll be honest, I'm minded to send the guy a thesaurus, you know? LEARN MORE WORDS, PLEASE, I BEG YOU.
Meta-Data
In Data Journalism, Tech Matters Less Than the People — www.nytimes.com
I agree with this and reading it broke my heart a little bit because I realised one of the things missing from my current role is talking to people and getting stories from people volunteering details and information. It's never about the tech - as long as you can do the analysis - the key is *people*.
How to prepare your data for analysis and charting in Excel & Google Sheets — blog.datawrapper.de
This is a nice tutorial about cleaning data for analysis and charting, from Lisa Charlotte Rost at Datawrapper.
Informational Is Beautiful have a new 'news' section where they post nice graphics showing positive news stories, which is great. But one particular chart they published has time going both directions. Kaiser Fung discusses the chart and offers a different version (which for me, works better).
The Great(er) Bear – using Wikidata to generate better artwork — shkspr.mobi
Terence Eden sent this over - it's pretty nerdy/cool. This is a walkthrough of how to use SPARQL to query wikidata, and ultimately create a more accurate 'Great Bear' tube map where stations are named after famous people born in the UK.
I said I would try to keep an eye on #30daymapchallenge but it's been really hard to keep up and people keep submitting similar things so I haven't found much that's jumped out at me. But I LOVED this road map of Berlin by names.
Bad chart of the week
Unfortunately I don't know anything about the provenance of this, but someone tweeted it and it caught my eye... for all the wrong reasons, as you can see:
Why would you make a pie chart *harder* to read?
That's all for this week. If you enjoyed this issue, please tell all your friends about it! Get them to subscribe! Share the fun! Please also remind them to check their email to verify signing up because so many people subscribe then forget the email verification :)
Also, if you really enjoyed this with a nice cup of tea or something and you learned something new, you can ’buy a coffee’ for me, tip me via Paypal, or you can become a Patron of Fair Warning. Thanks in advance, and see you next week! :)