Politics Archive:
Why Does a Salad Cost More than a Big Mac?
In: Food Politics Source: NYT
11 Feb 2012Originally from PCRM, but I link to the NYT commentary below. Farm subsidies are a joke. Actually, almost all subsidies are a joke, now that I think about it.
The Deficit: Obama vs Bush
3 Feb 2012
European Response to Crisis
1 Feb 2012
Living in a QE World
31 Jan 2012Another problem brewing. The world is running out of places to kick the credit can. As usual, there is much insight to be gained from the discussion and comments over at Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture.
Graphic Enhanced State of the Union Address
In: Innovative Politics
31 Jan 2012The White House released a video of last week’s State of the Union address, with a split screen showing supporting charts, diagrams, and talking points. It’s not a brilliant model of visualization best practices by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a step in the right direction, and represents a recovery from the ridicule that Ross Perot received for using charts on the national political stage in 1992.
For further insight (on both design and economic issues), I HIGHLY RECOMMEND watching this in conjunction with Jodi Beggs critique over at Economists Do it With Models.
Red State Socialism
In: Politics
25 Jan 2012Anyone have a better idea of how to visualize this data? It feels like there should be one – but maybe sometimes a table is the right tool for the job.
The Strait of Hormuz
In: Interactive Maps Politics
23 Jan 2012This FT map illustrates just how packed things are at the Persian Gulf’s bottleneck. The designers wisely chose to allow viewers to select which layers of information they wanted to see, and also provided useful related information as popups.
Here is the map with all layers turned on – which obviously would have been a disaster without the interactive filtering.
(note: some FT features require a subscription to view)
SOPA Opera
In: Politics
20 Jan 2012
Ushahidi Visualization Platform
17 Jan 2012Ushahidi is a non-profit tech developer of free and open source software for collecting and real-time visualization crowd-sourced information. The project originated in a desire to map post-election violence in Kenya back in 2008 – but it has since expanded into a number of free toolsets that can be set up quickly during emergencies. To be honest, I haven’t dived too deep into this, but I wanted to post it in case others have a need.
Candidate Blind Date
11 Jan 2012Answer a series of 11 questions to see which presidential candidate’s views are most like your own. At the end, you can also roll over each candidates columns to see what their specific positions are. Personally, I thought some of the questions were slanted and missing answers that fit my beliefs – no shock, I suppose, considering they had to fit the answers to candidate platforms.
Press Freedom Map
9 Jan 2012I went to the Newseum this weekend (a great museum – recommend it to everyone) and saw the below wall sized map of freedom of the press. The online version of it isn’t much to look at, but the pop-up/drill down information for each country is very rich.
Online version (which was also available at the Museum at the kiosks you see above):
The Post is doing a great job visualizing the election so far, with a number of clear tools that they are keeping very up to date.
First up: Maps and interactive filtering of spending on ads, including videos of the ads themselves:
A Primary Tracker: mapping out candidate visits, “pre-game analysis”, results by county, and “post-game analysis” – for EACH state!
And a campaign finance explorer:
They also have something called the @MentionMachine that supposedly tracks candidates by twitter mentions and other media references that you can drill down through. Unfortunately, it isn’t working for me on either Firefox or IE.
Washington’s Revolving Door
In: Politics
29 Dec 2011Each pair of circles shows people who left government service to work/lobby for major corporate interests.
Charting the Euro Zone Crisis
20 Dec 2011
Iraq and Afghanistan Casualties
In: Graphic Design (bad) Interactive Maps Politics Source: Washington Post Source: WSJ
19 Dec 2011There are a lot of these graphs out there. What I like about this presentation from the WSJ is that each dot in each bar can be clicked on for a short biography of the person who died – a nice combination of information and gravitas.
CNN’s tool maps out where they came from and where they died, and provides an area for others to leave memories for each fallen. While information rich, this one felt very sterile to me, and I couldn’t find anyone that had the “memories” section filled in.
The NYT’s went strangely artsy, with a digitized mosaic menu of the fallen’s faces:
The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen feature does a good job of presenting summary information, as well as photos of each soldier:
And the Huffington post comes up with the least interactive, self-identified as interactive (ALL CAPS IN THE TITLE!!!), series of charts I’ve even seen. Pretty sad.
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- Another fed up American: Why is it that they always make the cuts from Defense, rather than (say) the Department of Education [...]
- Martin: Manager asks geek to document process. The longer the geek takes to document, the longer the geek ke [...]
- Steve: Budgets aren't subject to the filibuster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_S [...]
- Nathan: Rogier, follow the link to NPR and you will read that education has been lumped in with "everything [...]
- mims: Lol, the lazy man. I'd say the efficient woman. Or man. ;) [...]