Smoke from the wildfires made its way to the other side of the country and over the ocean. Using data from NOAA, Reuters animated the smoke clouds over time: With climate change expected to exacerbate fires in the future, by worsening droughts and warming surface ocean temperatures, wildfire research is becoming especially important. Over the last year, the world has seen record fires in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Siberia and now...
For The Washington Post, Ashlyn Still and Kevin Schaul charted how long it took for primary ballots to be counted in each state. The times might give a hint of what we’re in for on election night: Before the pandemic struck, mail-in states like California were already counting slowly. Then the coronavirus forced dozens of states to quickly expand absentee voting, and the slowdowns got more dramatic. These two trends...
Welcome to another edition of Misleading or Not, where we decide if a map is misleading or not. Read More
An often painful yet necessary step in visualization is to get your data in the right format. Arquero, from the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, aims to make this part of the process easier: Arquero is a JavaScript library for query processing and transformation of array-backed data tables. Following the relational algebra and inspired by the design of dplyr, Arquero provides a fluent API for manipulating column-oriented data frames....
For your analytical perusal, Emil Hvitfeldt provides ten seasons’ worth of scripts from the Friends sitcom in an easy-to-use R package: The goal of friends to provide the complete script transcription of the Friends sitcom. The data originates from the Character Mining repository which includes references to scientific explorations using this data. This package simply provides the data in tibble format instead of json files. The ten seasons ran from...
North Drinkware molded Half Dome in the bottom of a hand-blown pint glass using elevation data from the United States Geological Survey. Wow. [via @blprnt] Tags: elevation, glass, Half Dome, North Drinkware
In yesterday's post, I reviewed one section of 538's visualization of its election forecasting model, specifically, the post focuses on the probability plot visualization. The visualization, technically called a pdf, is a mainstay of statistical graphics. While every one of 40,000 scenarios shows up on this chart, it doesn't offer a direct answer to our topline question. What is Nate's call at this point in time? Elsewhere in their post,...
Bloomberg mapped tree loss between 2000 and 2019 in Brazil: “What we have seen in Brazil is that rainforest protection is a highly political issue,” says Gerlein-Safdi of the University of Michigan. “With every change in government, laws can change very quickly, both for better or for worse.” In some areas, the damage has been done. Efforts to build roads through the forest have opened up large swaths to exploitation....
With mail-in ballots looking to be more common than ever this year, NYT’s The Upshot is tracking the mail: The data here, covering more than 28 million pieces of first-class letters tracked by SnailWorks, shows how on-time delivery declined noticeably in July after the arrival of Louis DeJoy, the Trump-aligned postmaster general, and the start of policies to trim transportation costs. That drop in national performance was more abrupt than...
As anyone who is familiar with Nate Silver's forecasting of U.S. presidential elections knows, he runs a simulation that explores the space of possible scenarios. The polls that provide a baseline forecast make certain assumptions, such as who's a likely voter. Nate's model unshackles these assumptions from the polling data, exploring how the outcomes vary as these assumptions shift. In the most recent simulation, his computer explores 40,000 scenarios, each...
