Hello. Welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
This week’s newsletter features the following graph more common heat wavesAmerican exceptional exceptionalism and weather comparison Throughout the city.
First, let’s take a closer look at the Australian bushfires.
With only a few months left until bushfire season, hundreds of thousands of hectares and hundreds of homes have already burned in Victoria state. We investigated a devastating fire that occurred during the first week of January.
Click to see an animated version of this wind/temperature map (based on one of our favorite visualizations), as well as other maps and photos showing the extent of fire spread and damage.
While we’re talking about fires, our colleagues in the UK have a series of maps showing how wildfires are consuming more and more of the world’s forests (thanks to climate change). ABC also had an interesting article about combining different data sources to create real-time wildfire data. It turns out it’s not all about the satellites.
chart from 2 weeks summer
1. You are look suffer from it more and more
The intense heatwave that hit southeastern Australia in early January is five times more likely to be caused by climate change, according to an analysis by climate scientists. But 5 times whatthat’s right? ABC had a very simple but effective graphic to make this a little more tangible.
And speaking of heat waves, here’s an illustrated ABC story from a few years ago about why heat waves are so dangerous.
2. Executives who write a lot of emails love AI.
First of all, please listen to this graph with a grain of salt. This chart is based on research from an AI company created to power consulting services. I couldn’t find anything about the research methodology beyond “Survey of 5,000 knowledge workers at 1,000 (+-) person companies in the US, UK, and Canada.”
However, even so, the result is feels right And it’s also horrifyingly funny in its own way.
The results, graphed here by the Wall Street Journal, show a wide gap between employees and executives when it comes to time saved by AI.
Employees were also much more likely to say they were “anxious or overwhelmed” about AI, compared to those in executive positions who were more likely to say they were “excited.”
My (Nick’s) take on this is that if your job involves writing a lot of emails and giving presentations, and you’re not too worried about losing your job to a robot, you’re probably more excited about AI in the workplace.
Another issue highlighted in the WSJ article is that when accuracy is important, the time saved using AI may be offset by the need for employees to correct errors.
3. Oh, that’s very exceptional.
It turns out that America is not an exceptional country, only a short-sighted view of its own exceptionalism. Amanda Schendruk, a graduate of the Guardian newspaper, has a series of very well designed graphs that show that America is indeed an outlier in many ways.
Schendruk points to a range of indicators, from the lack of state-mandated parental leave to trust in government and life expectancy.
4. Stack on stack on stack
According to the New York Times, Mr. Trump has amassed an astonishing amount of money (16,822 times the median household income in the United States) since retaking office as president.
This is a graphic that needs to be experienced on the big screen. Each bundle of banknotes raining down is worth $83,730, which is the median household income in the United States. The torrent of funds from things like media payments and crypto sales is so massive that repeated catastrophes are necessary. That’s a really nice design touch.
Also, NYT’s graphics wizards (if you’re reading this) Nick would like to know the math and tricks to make the physics of falling cash work on different screen sizes while also ensuring that the pile of money lines up with the line on the threshold chart on the side.
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Off the Charts
This 3D weather map has been causing a lot of discussion in some datavis places on the internet, so I thought it would be interesting to include this week.
Arthur Juliani created this weather visualizer in 3D space that basically renders weather data as a line graph.
Several people responded to Juliani’s post on X.com and suggested that the data would be better displayed as a traditional line graph or as a polar/radar plot.
Giuliani said he feels this format is easier to read because it has temperature on the Y-axis (top and bottom) and also has a continuous curve that traditional line graphs don’t have.
For comparison, here is a simple polar map that I (Nick) created from average temperatures in Sydney and Melbourne.
If you have strong opinions about the format of weather maps, please write them in the comments section of the website version of the newsletter or reply to the newsletter email. We may publish the best ones.
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