Seems about right. (Who made it?)

Reporting for The New York Times, Giovanni Russonello on the decennial census during these times:

If households can’t be reached, even by enumerators, then census takers rely on a process known as imputation — that is, they use data from demographically similar respondents to take a best guess at what the missing data ought to say.

“This year I can imagine imputation being much higher, and that will itself be a source of controversy — because imputation involves assumptions,” Dr. Miller said. “No matter what you do at that point, you’re going to have a bunch of places around the country that are unhappy with the numbers, and are going to sue. So there’s going to be a lot of controversy around this.”

Where more imputation is needed, Dr. Miller said, the door opens a bit wider for statistical wrangling — and, potentially, more political influence.

In 2010, 74 percent of households responded. This year, with only about a month left, 63 percent have responded.

In a time when data is ubiquitous and affects so many things that we do, the census count grows more uncertain. Strange.

For NYT Opinion, Yaryna Serkez and Stuart A. Thompson estimated where we’re ready:

Our analysis considers two main things: the rate of new infections in a county and the county’s testing capabilities. We used guidelines from the Harvard Global Health Institute, which proposed a variety of ways to open schools as long as the county has fewer than 25 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 people. We also used the World Health Organization’s proposal to open only if fewer than 5 percent of all those who are tested for the virus over a two-week period actually have it.

The second part matters because if a higher proportion of people are testing positive, it could mean that not enough tests are being conducted to adequately measure the spread.

As you might expect, based on these guidelines, reopening in some places and not others poses disparities when you start breaking down demographics.

After seeing stoxart, I was reminded of Michael Najjar’s project High Altitude from 2010-ish. He used photos he captured while climbing Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, as the backdrop for stock data:

The series visualizes the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years. The virtual data mountains of the stock market charts are resublimated in the craggy materiality of the Argentinean mountainscape. Just like the indices, mountains too have their timeline, their own biography. The rock formations soaring skywards like so many layered folds of a palimpsest bear witness to the life history of the mountain – stone storehouses of deep time unmeasureable on any human scale. The immediate reality of nature thus becomes a virtual experience. Such experience of virtuality is strikingly exemplified by the global economic and financial system. If the focus used to be on the exchange of goods and commodities, it is now securely on the exchange of immaterial information.

The above is the price for Lehman Brothers from 1992 to 2008.

stoxart is a project by Gladys where she turns stock market charts to landscape illustrations. The peaks become mountains, the dips become a space for the moon and the stars. The above is an illustration for Purple, which specializes in mattresses, and its base chart which forms the landscape.

Here’s another for Ford, with an apt illustration of a Ford truck riding the terrain:

Grab a print here (or request a custom one).

It reminds me of Michael Najjar’s project High Altitude from 2010, but instead, he used photoshopped mountains to show stock prices (which I’m surprised I never posted on FD).

The United States Postal Service is losing mail sorting machines — as an election during a pandemic gets closer. The Washington Post reports on what they know so far, including the map above on reduced sorting capacity.

This past month an old chart type poked its head out from behind the trees and I’m here for it.

There’s going to be a lot more voting by mail this year. The New York Times shows what each state is doing. It’s a cartogram. So it must be election season.

The election is coming. FiveThirtyEight just launched their forecast with a look at the numbers from several angles. Maps, histograms, beeswarms, and line charts, oh my. There is also a character named Fivey Fox, which is like Microsoft’s old Clippy providing hints and tips to interpret the results.

One thing you’ll notice, and I think newsrooms have been working towards this, there’s a lot of uncertainty built into the views. It’s clear there are multiple hypothetical outcomes and there’s minimal use of percentages, opting for fuzzier sounding odds.

Remember when election forecasting went the opposite direction? They tried to build more concrete conclusions than talking heads. Now pundits frequently talk about the numbers (maybe misinterpreted at times), and the forecasts focus on all possible outcomes instead of what’s most likely to happen.

Slime mold are single-celled organisms that can work together to form multicellular structures. Antonio Sánchez Chinchón used slime mold simulations generate these images:

This post talks about a generative system called Physarum model, which simulates the evolution of a colony of extremely simple organisms that, under certain environmental conditions, result into complex behaviors. Apart from the scientific interest of the topic, this model produce impressive images like this one, that I call The Death of a Red Dwarf

You can check out the code, a combination of R and C++, on GitHub.

For NYT Opinion, Gus Wezerek charted the gaps between white and black mortality rate:

If Black people had died at the same age-adjusted rate as white people in 2018, they would have avoided 65,000 premature, excess deaths — the equivalent of three coach buses filled with Black people crashing and killing them all every day of the year.

…oof.

The variable width bar chart above is one of several graphics in the piece. Height represents rate. Width represents the gap. Direction represents which group has the higher rate.

Liana Finck for Man Repeller draws out the new timeline. I’m a couple of decades removed from this timeline, but it doesn’t look very fun. I’m always down to plant some scallions though. [via swissmiss]

If someone sneezes in a closed space, you hope that the area has good ventilation, because those sneeze particles are going to spread. The New York Times explains in the context of a subway train.

Wear a mask.

You can basically hook up an antennae to your laptop and start receiving images from space. This DIY guide from Public Lab amazes me.

The NOAA satellites have inbuilt radio antennas that transmit the data collected by the AVHRR instrument on a frequency in the 137 MHz range. To minimise interference between satellites, each NOAA satellite transmits on a different frequency within the 137 MHz range.

[…]

Your antenna is a sensor. It catches electromagnetic waves and transforms them into an electrical current i.e. an electrical signal. All antennas are tuned to specific frequency ranges meaning that they receive or transmit these frequencies best. Most antennas are directional.

I need to try this.

Herd immunity works when you have enough people who are immune to a disease, maybe because they already got it or there’s a vaccine, so that the disease can’t spread anymore to those who don’t have a resistance. For The Washington Post, Harry Stevens is back with simulitis to demonstrate how this works in greater detail.

It starts at the individual level, generalizes to a larger group, and then zooms out to the more concrete state level. It ends with an interactive that lets you test the thresholds yourself.

Each step builds on the previous, which provides clarity to an otherwise abstract idea.

We know the big ones. Now here are the small ones. Focused. Efficient.

Malofiej, which in the visual journalism sphere is a high-tier honor to win each year, announced the winners for 2019. Congratulations to Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma for The New York Times on their Best of Show in print. They showed the various paths to Congress. And congrats to National Geographic for Best of Show in digital. They showed the moons.

Check out all of the medal winners here. Lots of good stuff.

We’ve been hearing a lot about national unemployment rate, but it’s not uniformly distributed across the country. Some areas are a lot higher, some places are a lot lower, and there are places in between. To see the variation across the United States, Yair Ghitza and Mark Steitz estimated unemployment at the tract level.

Quoctrung Bui and Emily Badger for NYT’s The Upshot have the maps and histograms zooming in on places where unemployment is the highest.

With Joe Biden calling for 100% clean electricity, John Muyskens and Juliet Eilperin for The Washington Post looked at where states are at now in terms of electricity generation.

The variable width bar chart above uses a column for each state. Clean electricity stacks on the top and fossil fuels stack on the bottom, each representing a percentage of total generation. Column width represents total electricity for each state.

It reminds me of the spending graphic by Interactive Things in 2010. I think variable width is about to be a thing again.