An interactive visualisation of ~200 recent ransomware attacks around the world, displaying a clear trend… These are a growing, non-discriminating scourge crossing every sector and potentially any organisation. We’ve charted most recent and notable ones. Flagging, where possible, when ransoms have actually been paid (but most outcomes are ‘unknown’). Let us know if we’ve missed any major ones. A work-in-progress. We’ll keep this updated. » see the interactive » review...
The New York Times mapped birth rates, which are down almost everywhere, especially among women in their 20s: The result has been the slowest growth of the American population since the 1930s, and a profound change in American motherhood. Women under 30 have become much less likely to have children. Since 2007, the birthrate for women in their 20s has fallen by 28 percent, and the biggest recent declines have...
Bloomberg used a Sankey diagram to show the path of over a thousand voting bills, classifying them as restrictive, mixed effect, or expansive: Across the country, Republican state lawmakers proposed more than 300 bills this year to restrict voting and dozens more that would restrict in some ways and expand in others. But the broadest measures either stalled or were scaled back. Tags: bills, government, voting
This chart appears in the latest ("last print issue") of Schwab's On Investing magazine: I know I don't like triangular charts, and in this post, I attempt to verbalize why. It's not the usual complaint of distorting the data. When the base of the triangle is fixed, and only the height is varied, then the area is proportional to the height and thus nothing is distorted. Nevertheless, my ability to...
Prasanta Kumar Dutta and Manas Mishra reporting for Reuters on the slow rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations in India: Compared to many Western countries, India was late in procuring vaccines. Modi’s government placed the first advance order for an unapproved vaccine only this month, after being criticised for being slow. Countries including the United States and Britain signed orders last year. Tags: coronavirus, India, Reuters, vaccine
It’s hot here in the western United States, and it’s only mid-June. From The Washington Post, we’re stuck in a heat dome: Hot air masses expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. One way to gauge the magnitude of a heat wave is to measure the height of the typical halfway point of the atmosphere — at the 500 millibar...
To measure drought in the present day, we use data from sensors that constantly record environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, precipitation, and snow water content. But to measure drought thousands of years ago, researchers can use tree rings. Alvin Chang for The Guardian shows how the researchers line up old rings to gather historical data and then do that across a region. Tags: Alvin Chang, drought, Guardian, tree ring
Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer have a new book out: A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication. They rewind back 400 years and discuss the beginnings of visualization, when nobody knew what a chart was. Putting this in my queue and hoping it’s back in stock soon. Visualization still seems like a relatively new thing. It’s old. Tags: book, history, Howard Wainer, Michael Friendly, New Yorker
Welcome to issue #144 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members about how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I broke down one of my projects and explained as many of the design choices as I could, while showing how I do it in the software. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
This looks promising: While it is often easy, and tempting, to write a scraper as a dirty one-off script, spatula makes an attempt to provide an easy framework that most scrapers fit within without additional overhead. This reflects the reality that many scraper projects start small but grow quickly, so reaching for a heavyweight tool from the start often does not seem practical. The initial overhead imposed by the framework...
