Here’s the good stuff for November.

In a multi-faceted piece, The Washington Post described the rapidly growing cities in Africa that are projected to be the most populated cities in the world:

In three projections by the University of Toronto’s Global Cities Institute, Africa accounted for at least 10 of the world’s 20 most populous cities in 2100. Even in the institute’s middle-of-the-road development scenario, cities that many Americans may seldom read about, such as Niamey, Niger, and Lusaka, Zambia, eclipse New York City in growth.

Many U.S. cities such as Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, D.C. are projected to fall out of the top 100 by 2100.

Using data from Project FeederWatch, which is a community tracking project to count birds around feeders, Miller et al. estimated the pecking order among 200 species. This was in 2017. For The Washington Post, Andrew Van Dam and Alyssa Fowers worked with the researchers for an updated ranking using a more comprehensive dataset. The result is bird power rankings 2021 edition.

I scraped my inbox when I got a bunch of emails on Cyber Monday. It seemed like a lot, but I wondered by how much. It was about five times more than usual, which is a bigger shock to the system when volume a few days before on Thanksgiving was nearly zero.

This chart, made by someone who is against vaccinations, shows a higher mortality rate for those who are vaccinated versus those who are not. Strange. It shows real data from the Office of National Statistics in the UK. As explained by Stuart McDonald, Simpson’s Paradox is at play:

[W]ithin the 10-59 age band, the average unvaccinated person is much younger than the average vaccinated person, and therefore has a lower death rate. Any benefit from the vaccines is swamped by the increase in all-cause mortality rates with age.

If you’re unfamiliar, Simpson’s Paradox is when a trend appears in separate groups but then disappears or reverses when you combine the groups. In this case, the confounding factors of age and vaccine uptake makes the above chart useless.

When you compare the price of things today against prices one year ago, almost everything increased in cost at a rapid rate. While out of the ordinary, it’s definitely not the first time this happened. The New York Times zoomed out to show year-over-year price change since 1960, framing the timeline in the context of age generations.

Zoom into the data super close, and every blip can seem like a mountain. Zoom out for a better sense of scale.

With candy corn as her medium, Jill Hubley mapped corn production in the United States, based on data from the USDA. With just three hues of yellow, orange, and white and three heights to match, Hubley was able to clearly show the geographical patterns.

For reference, here is the USDA corn map:

Finally, I have a use for my kids’ leftover Halloween candy.

For NYT’s The Upshot, Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui outlined all of the provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better bill and where the $2 trillion over 10 years will come from. A treemap provides an overview that sticks to the top of the page as you scroll through the table of line items.

Choosing a place to live is always full of trade-offs, but it’d be nice if there was a way to minimize those trade-offs. For NYT Opinion, Gus Wezerek and Yaryna Serkez, made a calculator that lets you weight your priorities to find the city that fits best with how you want to live:

Places can score zero to 10 points for each metric. To calculate each place’s match percentage, we add up its scores across metrics that a reader has selected and divide by the total number of possible points. If a reader selects the checkboxes for trees and mountains, a place with a score of 6 for trees and 8 for mountains will be a 70 percent match.

Places with no data for a metric receive zero points. For starred metrics, we double the number of points scored and available to make them count twice as much toward the match percentage.

Read more on their methodology here. The interactive is based on data from the Census Bureau, Realtor.com, AccuWeather, and Yelp.

After checking the boxes that are important to you, you get a list of cities that best fit the criteria, based on an aggregated match percentage.

I found this is also an excellent way to feel less sure about your current residence and to wonder why areas that you thought would strongly dislike appear at the top of the list.

Some people point out that vaccinated people are still hospitalized as a defense against getting vaccinated. But they ignore the inverse which compares the number of those who are not hospitalized. Marc Rummy made this Euler diagram to illustrate the inverse. (Update: Rummy provides an updated version of the diagram here.)

It’s about making a fair comparison. People who wear seat belts can still die in a car collision. People who use condoms can still get STIs. People who eat healthy can still have high cholesterol. But we know these things reduce the chances of dying in a car crash, of getting an STI, and having high cholesterol, so we adjust our choices.

[via @visualisingdata]

Statisticians David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters for The Guardian on reframing risk estimates:

An earlier UKHSA study estimated two Pfizer/BioNTech doses gave around 99.7% (97.6% to near-100%) protection against Delta-infected hospitalisation, but after 20 weeks that effectiveness waned to 92.7% (90.3% to 94.6%). This estimated decline for people over 16 may not sound much, but if we look at it in terms of “lack of protection”, their estimated vulnerability relative to being unvaccinated went from 0.3% to 7.3%. That is a major, although uncertain, increase in risk.

Such “negative framing” can change impressions: “90% fat-free” sounds rather different than “10% fat”.

What is the best french fry shape? Curly of course. But Chris Williams took it a step further and used 3-D models of various fried potato forms to find out. It’s all about the ratio between crispy exterior and fluffy interior.

It’s a shift from answering “What is this data?” to “So what?”

While still relatively rare, maternal mortality in the United States increased over the years. In most other developed countries, rates decreased over the same time period. From NYT Opinion:

Over the past two decades, maternal mortality has increased almost 60 percent. The United States is the only other Group of 7 country besides Canada to experience such a drastic decline in maternal health. (Canada saw a minor increase in pregnancy-related deaths.)

Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post used a bar chart with corrections to show new monthly estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for job growth:

After the revisions, disappointing months like August looked a lot more like October, a month that was hailed as a labor market rebound. In hindsight, while a blockbuster June and July were even better than they looked, they didn’t lead to months of stagnation — they diminished somewhat, but still produced solid, steady growth that continued through October.

It’s like the data carries uncertainty, which can make estimation a challenge. Imagine that.

Pitch Interactive and the Census 2020 Data Co-op, supported by the Google News Initiative, made a tool that lets you easily map population shifts since 2010. It’s called Census Mapper.

Built with journalists in mind, you can zoom in to the tract level and select any set of racial groups. The map updates. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can embed the tool on a website. You can only embed the entire tool for now, as opposed to just the map of a specific geographic area and level, but it looks promising.

David Leonhardt for The New York Times looked at the partisan gap for Covid deaths and cases. It keeps getting wider:

The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

This is a fun map by Matt Dzugan. Search for a city, and see the segments of highway in the United States that are headed that way:

I set up thousands of queries to Google Maps, asking for directions from Point A to Point B and parsed its responses, looking for the text toward ___, signs for __, and ramp to ___.

This enabled me to build a database of all the segments of road that are listed as heading towards various cities.

We know the oceans are deep, but it’s difficult to grasp the scale of just how deep, because, well, it’s underwater. MetaBallStudios, a YouTube channel that focuses on perspective and 3-D animation, guides you through the depths of major bodies of water. You’ll pass notable on-land monuments along the way. [via kottke]