Replicating a New York Times d3.js Chart with Tableau

Click to view the interactive at the NYT by Shan Carter and Kevin Quealy

I am a huge, HUGE, fan of the visual design work created at the New York Times.  I have been following their work since Amanda Cox joined in 2005, when there was a noticeable change in the quality of visualizations.  (Here is an example of Amanda's process for the Facebook IPO piece in 2012.)

There's an amazing bunch of people on that design team - and they are very generous with sharing their expertise; you can follow their process at Chartsnthings.  Much of their interactive work is created with d3.js which I haven't learned and had always hoped that eventually I might be able to produce something similar with Tableau.

Well, I think I have.  It's not perfect, but it's close.

Tableau Civic Data Contest

CLICK ME!  CLICK ME!

Tableau is holding another data viz contest.    There's some amazing visualizations posted from around the world.  Check them out and vote for your favorite via twitter.

Civic Data Contest Entries

Viz Policing a Rachel Maddow Chart

Rachel Maddow's show is one of the few things I enjoy watching on television.  Tonight, while she was interviewing Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, I became seriously distracted by this chart.  I kept looking at it expecting it to be telling me more than it did.

As I continued to watch the interview, my mind kept obsessing over that dang chart.  I wonder, is it necessary for this medium to bad chart - does television require a certain amount of chart bling in order to keep their audience?  Or is it that the graphics have to match the set or the celebrity brand?  Do these shows follow certain branding rules for all graphics?

So I re-charted.  It only took 10 minutes and it didn't interfere with the rest of my life, so no, I do not have a vizing addiction.

What. No Funny Babies?! How parents' describe their children...

What we say about our children says a lot about us.  I came across this great article in Slate,  No Big Deal, but This Researcher’s Theory Explains Everything About How Americans Parent which discusses new research in parental ethnotheories by Harkness and Super at the University of Connecticut among six Western societies.  How we describe our children reflects our parenting styles and cultural values.

Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we’re making choices.

In other words, your most personal observations of your child are actually cultural constructions. In a study conducted by Harkness and her international colleagues, American parents talked about their children as intelligent and even as “cognitively advanced.” (Also: rebellious.) Italian parents, though, very rarely praised their children for being intelligent. Instead, they were even-tempered and “simpatico.” So although both the Americans and the Italians noted that their children asked lots of questions, they meant very different things by it: For the Americans, it was a sign of intelligence; for the Italians, it was a sign of socio-emotional competence. The observation was the same; the interpretation was radically different.

US Gun Deaths in Contrast

Since the Sandy Hook shooting tragedy, the gun issue in the US is being seriously (and sometimes irrationally) debated while the families and community struggle with their loss and grief.  Being from a country with gun regulations, it is hard to watch and read some of the extreme misinformation being spouted.

I don't think there's a country on the planet that doesn't have some gun deaths each year, but there are plenty who have put in place measures aimed to reduce the volumes. The countries below represent nations similar to US culture, many of whom have enacted some form of regulation as a result of a similar tragedy.

Will the US Avert the Fiscal Cliff?

Not likely, with this Congress

With only a few hours left, it doesn't look promising that the 112th Congress will be able to pass even one more bill, to add to their lacklustre record of 219 bills passed during session.

This Congress will have the distinction of having passed the fewest bills in 65 years of record. That's quite a sad achievement.

The following viz shows the congressional record since 1947, with the number of bills passed during the Speakers tenure.  At a glance, it's easy to see that a Democratically controlled house gets more done, even with a Republican presidency.  However, fewer bills have been passed in the past 2 decades compared to the previous 40 plus years.  It would seem that if this trend continues, democracy will be proven meaningless.

US Politics: The Economics of Bush and Obama

Tableau is holding an Interactive Political Viz contest and I'm pretty sure they've forgotten about us Canadians again.  I've been playing with this viz for a while, not for the contest, but out of an interest in the economic crisis and politics.  I don't watch reality tv, but I'm addicted to American politics.  And let's not kid ourselves, American policies affect the world.

My focus with this viz was not so much about learning new tricks with Tableau as with telling the story.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

Herman Cain's 999 ? Just say Nein!

I'm Canadian, so it's really none of my business, but if America lowers Richie Rich's taxes, Canada will follow suit.  So will the rest of the world.  If 2008 has taught us anything, it's that we live with the consequences of a World Economy now.

The Tax Policy Centre recently published an analysis of Herman Cain's 999 Tax Reform Plan, which is very enlightening, but doesn't readily illustrate the magnitude of the great gains the 1% will reap.