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Fair Warning - Agony aunts, crime, and tracking America

Fair Warning
Fair Warning - Agony aunts, crime, and tracking America
By Sophie Warnes • Issue #64 • View online
Hello! Have you missed this?! Fair Warning has become somewhat intermittent since I committed to working on a project on Sundays and got busier during the week.
I’ve been especially busy at work with a couple of projects, one you’ll see in this letter, and another next week. I’m hoping that my hard work pays off..!

On the home front
Brexit: Where we are in eight charts
Consider this your one-stop shop for Brexit stuff. I really like the resignations chart, that’s something I’ve seen the Telegraph do too. Personally, I don’t think I have ever had to care about anything for more than six months and my tolerance for Brexit content is pretty much zero.
www.bbc.co.uk  •  Share
I feel like I saw this and put it in here before, so apologies if this is a duplicate, but I think it’s pretty cool. In Cardiff, 1-2 bed homes are second least affordable in my postcode (up-and-coming/young, mostly apartment complexes and terraced housing) and when you switch to 3-4 bed homes you see that other, leafier more ‘family-friendly’ areas are most expensive.
www.bbc.co.uk  •  Share
This is something I wrote, along with statisticians that work on crime data at ONS. My colleague Zoe did the visualisations. I think it’s quite a handy resource for better understanding and interpreting crime statistics. But then I guess I would say that.
www.ons.gov.uk  •  Share
Does what it says on the tin - this is a data explorer for all of London’s boroughs. Things I thought particularly interesting - voter registration and turnout, business survival rates (much better in the south!), walking(!!!), and some of the skills stuff. Worth a ten minute nose around. [H/T Guiseppe and In Other News]
lbbd.emu-analytics.net  •  Share
Over the pond
Tracking America in the age of Trump
Ooooooh I love this. This was published just before the election, and the metrics used are really quite interesting. I only ever hear people talk about jobs growth and unemployment, but I do wonder how much damage someone can do in two years if they don’t actually do much and the trend was going upwards anyway.
www.economist.com  •  Share
I never really think of HuffPo as excelling at visualisation but I have to say, when the midterm results started coming in, this was my favourite page - I love that you could change between an actual map and a ‘seat’ map which only shows one block per seat. This is the only live results page I’ll mention here since it was so long ago(!) but there was lots of great coverage.
elections.huffingtonpost.com  •  Share
There’s been loads of analysis since the elections obviously, but I quite liked this one from The Economist since it looks at voting patterns from a different angle - based on past voting trends.
www.economist.com  •  Share
This map, created after the fires started in California, is updated every six hours and shows where the smoke is most intense - and therefore where there are bigger health risks.
www.nytimes.com  •  Share
Odds and ends
30 Years of American Anxieties
Oh my god this is amazing. This is three decades of letters written to an agony aunt, but categorised and analysed as data. It’s fascinating how it also tracks social shifts in America - just look at the volume of LGBT or religious themed letters and how it changes in those years. Awesome. Also extremely into the Odd category where the only sensible response is 🤨/😱
pudding.cool  •  Share
This is from earlier in the year but I hadn’t seen it until now. Prof Alasdair Rae figured out where the densest square kilometre in every European country was. This is just the top 15, it’s a shame that it’s only a picture gallery.
www.theguardian.com  •  Share
Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map? This is quite an astonishing look at how Apple has radically changed its maps to take account of really small details in the landscape. And how some of it is very wrong.
www.justinobeirne.com  •  Share
One last thing here that I didn’t want to put as a link in the same way as everything else because it’s incredibly niche (and well done for reaching this point!) If you work with health stats in England you might find this new GSS health stats landscape page really useful, as it points you to where you can find specific datasets.
That’s everything! If you are enjoying reading Fair Warning, please forward it to people who would also like it, encourage friends to subscribe to it, buy me a coffee to say thanks, or support Fair Warning on Patreon if you’re so inclined. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.
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Sophie Warnes

A weekly newsletter with anywhere between 10 and 20 links about data journalism, data visualisation, and storytelling, curated by a British data journalist and nerd. Expect politics, statistics, society and culture - all through the frame of data... With a dash of whimsy.

Read more about the author at www.sophiewarnes.com.

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