Fair Warning - Political segregation, mechanical maps, and migration
Hello! Exciting meta-news: After two years and three months, and 129 issues, Fair Warning has reached 1,000 subscribers! 🎉 It's really nice to know that people appreciate something that takes a lot of time and effort to put together.
This week I had my MMR jab because it turns out that I (along with, I imagine, a chunk of other people my age) missed my second mumps injection because of how they administered them, so have been vulnerable for about 25 years. Great. I thought this chart on vaccination coverage in England was kind of interesting. Please vaccinate your children :)
On the home front
The Ups and Downs of the Pound Show May’s Turbulent Leadership — www.bloomberg.com
The PM's time in office, alongside the fluctuation of the pound against the dollar.
English councils warned about 'exhausting' reserve cash
Local councils in England face "systemic underfunding" which has meant that 11 councils have had to dip into their cash reserves. They risk running out of money within four years. Northamptonshire County Council has seen reserves drop by 91%, and was forced to stop non-essential spending for 2017-18. Yikes.
Brexit tea leaves — graphics.reuters.com
How have investors been betting on the strength or weakness of the pound since 2016? I've never seen anything like this before (in terms of content; obviously quite familiar with scrollytelling as a thing). It's a different perspective on the Brexit thing.
I thought this was kind of cool - someone 3D printed the local election results for Greater Manchester. Now please do the rest of the UK. Thank you.
Over the pond
Where Democrats And Republicans Live In Your City — projects.fivethirtyeight.com
The crux of this is a lovely find-your-own-city style map which shows you where people who are Republican or Democrat live. And interestingly there are definitely enclaves of eg, Dems in areas where there are mainly Repubs, and vice versa. New Orleans (which is an amazing city, and also where NICAR is next year - so exciting) is the second most polarised city in the US, after Jackson Mississippi. [Today I learned: I can't hear or read "Jackson, Mississippi" without singing Uptown Funk to myself.]
City names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident (which means a person who was born in, lived in, or is otherwise connected to a place). I actually don't know who most of the people are!
Bonus: The map was inspired by this map of the US using song titles, which is arguably more interesting.
How have the boundaries of the US changed over time? James TB Ives made this mechanical map in 1896 to show the changes to boundaries, from 1800 up until 1893. I couldn't find out much about it but here's a bit more detail about the map. I've never seen a mechanical map before! (BTW, you might do what I did and lose yourself for a while in those AMAZING rare maps on that second website. Incredibly detailed plan for the Battle of Wounded Knee, for instance.)
Elsewhere...
Centrist liberals gained the most power in the EU Parliament — www.economist.com
It was thought that populist parties would sweep the European Parliament elections across the board, but while Eurosceptic parties did gain 30 seats, pro-EU parties gained 32 seats. And for the first time in the parliament's history, the main two parties did not achieve a majority.
Scars of war in historical emission data
This is quite interesting. This is CO2 emissions from a few countries (Bosnia, Armenia, Yugoslavia, Libya etc) over time, with the relevant war highlighted on the graph. Seems in most cases war leads to fewer emissions (too busy fighting to produce stuff?) but in one (Kuwait) it actually led to more.
Please enjoy this map of people who have never used a computer, by region in Europe.
The movement of people in Europe. This is quite nice, although very complicated as you might imagine! What is interesting to me is that no one(? is that really true?) is moving to Eastern European countries whereas many people are moving from there to western countries like Spain and Italy.
Odds and ends
An Artist Who Channels Her Anger Into Pie Charts — www.nytimes.com
Obviously I had to include this. I love this - Christine Sun Kim is a deaf artist who has recently completed a series of drawings about her frustrating experiences as a deaf person. I can relate to most of these ("movies with no captions on plane" is also a straight-up rage situation for me). You don't often see deaf people and their experiences discussed in mainstream media.
How could new metrics help to end homelessness?
This is slightly different as it's not about data itself, but I figure lots of you may have opinions on this: ONS has launched a public consultation about how to measure/understand homelessness from a statistical perspective. This blog is about the consultation and why it's happening, and there's a link in there so you can contribute to the consultation too.
Bad chart of the week
This is burgers eaten by day of the week. But look at the Y axis... Truly WTF. [Source]
That's everything for this week. I am on hiatus from Twitter for a while, but if you need to contact me you can always reply to this email. Helpful, right? If you enjoyed Fair Warning, please do forward to friends, family and colleagues, and encourage them to sign up. You can also become a Patron for Fair Warning, or you can say thank you by buying me a coffee.