Nov 7 2017
More Sophisticated Graphics In Today’s New York Times
“When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions […] But why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?[…] Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad. These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion. The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.”
The source for both charts is Adam Lankford from the University of Alabama. The charts Include countries with more than 10 million people and at least one mass public shooting with four or more victims.
Sourced from The New York Times
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Six months ago, I was bemoaning the absence of scatterplots in business analytics and more recently complimenting the New York Times for the sophistication of its graphics. Manufacturing professionals should not be shy about using scatterplots, as they have learned to do in Middle School. Here, they are used to highlight outliers, which isn’t the most common application. What this article — and these charts — show is how the tool can be used not just to solve technical problems but to inform a political debate as well.-
Sep 23 2023
Orbit Charts, Revisited
Data visualization is not just the art of presenting data to an audience. Upstream from this, you use visualizations in data cleaning to identify defective points, and in exploratory analysis, to identify patterns of interest. Then, you validate these patterns with a more formal analysis. Once confident that you have findings of value to communicate, you worry about making a compelling presentation.
Nick Desbarats and I had a long exchange on LinkedIn prompted by his article Connected Scatterplots Make Me Feel Dumb in Nightingale, the Data Visualization Society journal, on 8/29/2023. What he called Connected Scatterplot is what I call orbit charts, and I have found them helpful, particularly in analysis.
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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 1 • Tags: data science, Orbit chart, scatterplot, Visualization