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.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5C7sqVe2Vg” loop=”no” muted=”no” /]

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]

Patrick Sisson for The New York Times reports on the growing popularity of tracking customer movement in stores:

Complicating efforts to address privacy concerns is a lack of regulatory clarity. Without an overarching federal privacy law or even a shared definition of personal data, retailers must sort through layers of state and municipal rules, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act, said Gary Kibel, a partner at the law firm Davis+Gilbert who specializes in retail privacy.

Technology companies counter the pushback by noting that their systems are designed to limit what they collect and anonymize the rest. For instance, Standard AI’s system does not capture faces, so they cannot be analyzed with facial recognition technology.

Uh huh.

A term to indicate that visual elements add nothing meaningful has itself become nonessential to making and discussing charts.

Palm oil is in our food, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, and biofuels, but it has no flavor or color, so we’re not really aware of how much we use — on average 8 kilograms per year. Bloomberg explains why this is problematic, starting with the farmers, to the producers, to the consumers.

Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu for The Washington Post made a calculator that shows how much time you spend commuting in a year and what you could do with that time instead. The input, interaction, and calculations are straightforward. Just use the slider to specify your roundtrip commute time, and the numbers update.

The easiest thing to do would be to just provide the total hours. You commute for an hour per day? That’s 250 hours in a year. That seems like a lot of time, but on its own it’s an abstract calculation. The interactive takes the natural next step with what you could do with that time, which makes the calculation more tangible.

I do the same thing when describing money saved. A few dollars here and there doesn’t seem like much, but extrapolate that to Jack in the Box tacos, and you’re getting somewhere.

xkcd poked fun at the sometimes questionable color choices of researchers.

Using Consumer Price Index, Alyssa Fowers and Rachel Siegel for The Washington Post show how the prices of everyday things rose since 2019. A set of baseline charts show lines moving up much more than one would hope, due to coronavirus and supply chain issues.

All the tools are a product of visualization’s many uses, which isn’t so terrible. But not all the tools are champions.

[arve url=”https://vimeo.com/571217327″ loop=”no” muted=”no” /]

Valentina D’Efilippo, Arpad Ray, and Duncan Geere visualized and sonified Covid-19 rates and vaccinations in London Under the Microscope. Best viewed with headphones on. Geere on the sound:

Here’s how it works. There are two melodic saw wave drones separated by an octave – the higher represents cases, and the lower represents deaths. The chords that make them up each reflect the balance of different variants over time. As the data spikes, so does the filter cutoff.

The bassline reflects movement data. When people are moving around the city a lot, you hear the bassline move faster. During lockdown, when people were confined to their homes, it slows to a single beat for each bar.

Based on five years of data from EPA models, ProPublica mapped areas in the United States where cancer risk is higher due to air pollution:

In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.

Interact with the full map here.

If you’ve taken classes that cover image processing, you’ve likely come across the Lenna image. It’s a headshot of Lena Forsén taken from Playboy Magazine in 1972. For The Pudding, Jennifer Ding, with Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee, looked at use of the image in research over the years — despite copyright claims and Forsén’s wish for researchers to move on to a different image.

Ding used a straightforward bar chart to show the pattern over time, but the annotation provides a layer of context that tells you what those peaks and valleys mean.

The USDA recommends that you cook your chicken to at least 165°F to kill salmonella bacteria (time is also a factor), which appears to be more common than I would hope. ProPublica has a Chicken Checker so that you can find out. Look up the poultry product number on your pack of chicken, and you can see what percentage of USDA samples from the respective processing plant had salmonella.

A beeswarm chart shows how the plant’s rate compares to other plants that process the same type of poultry.

All I can think about now is that trend on social media from a while back where people cooked their chicken to rare. Mmm, salmonella.

The IEEE VIS 2021 conference is running virtually this week, and there’s a lot of work that’s caught my eye but I haven’t had the chance to look through it all yet. One of those things is the alt.VIS workshop that lead into the conference. The papers included such topics as Towards a Theory of Bullshit Visualization, Visualization for Villainy, and Manifesto for Putting Chartjunk in the Trash 2021!.

I’m giving this a hard bookmark to read later.