From XKCD: A History of the United States Congress

One of the great graphics of all time.

It's worth devoting an entire class.

- Click here for the full version.

From the Federalist: How RFRA Works, Explained In One Chart

- Click here for the accompanying article.

Spurious Correlations

One of the articles in the post below linked to this site. It's worth posting separately because at some point I'll ask students to interpret graphical data. Just because two events move together, which implies that they are connected to each other, does not mean that they are related. The phrase you hear over and over again is "correlation does not imply causation."

- Click here for the site.

Here is one of the - inverse - correlations they highlight. The spike in juvenile arrests for possession of marijuana seems to have been caused by the reduction in honey producing bee colonies. Obviously if you want to reduce the number of juveniles smoking pot we have to increase the number of honeybees. Makes perfect sense.

Looking ahead to the visual communications assessment

From Vox: The real state of the union, in 33 maps and charts

If you like maps and charts, you'll like this page.

- Click here for it.

It contains info about both the state of the union and the relative status of each state. So it's useful for both 2305 and 2306.

Here's a sampling:

From the New Republic: 17 Charts About Economic Inequality Obama Should Read Before The State of The Union

More background on the nature of inequality in the US in handy charts and graphs.

A few highlights:

Restless America

Click here for a nice interactive graphic showing which states people are moving from and to.

Here's the full static picture, and commentary.



Note that while it is true that half a million people mover to Texas in 2012 - 400,000 left.

What information do we really respond to?

The Dish flags a blog, which flags a UNC study about what types of information people best respond to.

We might be told how many calories are contained in a meal, but that information can be abstract, so we don't really respond to it. But we do if we are told how much exercise might be needed to work that meal off. Here's their example about how this information might be best communicated:

A study by researchers at UNC’s medical school, published in the journal Appetite, showed the kind of choices people make when randomly presented with different types of menus with differing levels of nutritional information: one with no nutritional info, one with calorie info, one with calories plus the minutes of walking required to burn the calories, and a fourth with calories plus the distance required to burn off the calories.

"People who viewed the menu without nutritional information ordered a meal totaling 1,020 calories, on average, significantly more than the average 826 calories ordered by those who viewed menus that included information about walking-distance," writes Scientific American. People who saw the menu with walking-distance info also ordered less than people who just saw calorie info.

Such a finding goes along with what researchers at Johns Hopkins have found. Signs posted on beverage cases in a convenience store about how much exercise it would take to burn off a bottle of soda (about 50 minutes of running) were much better at dissuading adolescents from buying sugary drinks than signs with just the calorie content. The researchers at UNC say they’re interested in bringing their study into the real-world as well--starting with the university cafeteria.

I always think information like this call to question the degree of free will and autonomous decision making power we have. Our decisions seem easily influenced.

A map of the Korean Peninsula and the surrounding area

Visualizing Economics

I stumbled across a site that specializes on graphical displays of economic data: Visualizing Economics. This is a compilation of graphics that began as a kickstarter project -neat idea.

Here's a two sample. I'll steal a few.

I like how this looks

The subject matter is immaterial to us, but this is very well done. I'd rip the style off if I had the skills.

Introducing Newsbound

I linked to their slides on the filibuster below, but here's a link to their website, which has a lot more. Like I said below, I wish my slides looked this good - something to work for I suppose.

- Newsbound.com

From visual.ly, a graphical depiction of the ideological history of the Supreme Court from 1937-2007:

From Forbes: The Year in Health Care Charts

A nice collection. Some highlights:

Which types of physicians are compensated the most? Note that pediatricians are compensated less than any other doctor. If you're in med school and known you'll be shouldering well over $100,000 in debt when you get out, what field are you going to specialize in? Why?



This answers a simple question. Why does health care cost so much in the US? Because Americans are charged more for it. Circular I know, but health care costs far less in most other advanced democracies than it does here.



And despite the fact that we pay more in health care, we don't exactly get more for it. Life expectancy in the US is no better - and is sometimes worse - than that in other advanced democracies.

Causes of death by age group

This graph wasn't in Klein's list of year important year-ending graphs, but he calls it the most chilling. It shows where guns place as leading causes of death among different age groups.

So what's causing the suffocation deaths among 10 - 14 year olds?

Children from wealthy families earm increasingly more than children from poorer families

This graph was offered by MIT economics professor Michael Greenstone:



This graph shows that children born to families on the high end of the earnings distribution have more resources available than did their counterparts in 1975, while children on the low end of the spectrum have fewer resources than low-income families in 1975. While there have been great increases in inequality over the last several decades, the figure suggests that further increases may be in store during the coming decades.”

Social mobility declines as income mobility increases

This graph was suggested by Cynthia Freeland:



“This is my graph of the year — known as The Great Gatsby Curve. The Great Gatsby Curve draws on the research of Canadian economist Miles Corak and was widely popularized in a January 2012 speech by Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. The Great Gatsby Curve is this year’s most important chart because it shows how social mobility declines as income inequality increases. At a time of rising income inequality, this is a hugely important finding because it suggests that the widening economic chasm imperils one of the characteristics many Americans believe is central to their society.”

The last few times the budget was in surplus, revenues were

Suggested by outgoing Senator Kent Conrad.




This chart demonstrates that additional revenue has to be part of any deficit reduction package. It shows that the last five times the budget was in surplus (in 1969, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001), revenue was near 20 percent of GDP. Revenue is now at 15.8 percent of GDP, near its lowest level in 60 years. And under the House Republican budget plan, revenue would reach only 18.7 percent of GDP by 2022, a clearly inadequate level. Even with spending cuts and entitlement changes, given the retirement of the baby boom generation and rising health costs, it is clear we are also going to need more revenue.”

From the Washington Post: The year in graphs

Ezra Klein asked some smart people to offer their selections for the graph of the year - the ones that explaining a major contemporary issue.

Here's a link to the story. I'll post a few separately.