VDS Digest—August 25th

As every Friday, the best charts and interactive articles from the digital press.

This week: Le Monde, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Straits Times, The New-York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

Golden Buzzer

Reuters published a very-well designed article on US anti-trans bills, using only converging and diverging lines, and scrollytelling to push through the story.

When I analyzed it on Twitter, I redeemed the chart a “rankflow chart”, though not exactly this.

Here is a short summary of rankflow charts:

Special Mention

This piece by Harry Stevens (The Washington Post) about energy sources in the US gets the special mention thanks to the opening animated chart!

This area bump chart shows how the different states energy sources evolved with time. Complex data, elegantly visualized. Also, the code is available online!

The Best-Of the Week

Global warming is causing the temperatures to rise, as this interactive article by Le Monde. With an element of personalization, you can pick your city (or one among suggestions) and see how the temperature has changed over the years (Le Monde):

If you have ever wondered what were the dominant colors of Singapore, this article will please you for it paints a colorful picture of the neighborhoods of the city (The Straits Times). It is quite well done, with some animations:

Particularly interesting is an interactive widget to explore the color composition of a photo in the dataset:

Still in Singapore, this article starts with a little game where you have to take a guess on how much a difference there is in a husband and wife’s earnings (The Straits Times). Once you have chosen an option with drag-and-drop, the results tell you how close you were.

You know how much I love gameful visualizations!

Later, an interactive slider lets you compare the earnings distribution for various income categories, so you can spot the asymmetry:

A sweet calendar (The Guardian) to know exactly when are Lyme ticks more present in the US:

There will soon be a referendum in Australia to recognize the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. It seems that national polls indicate a refusal, though support has steadily declined these past months (The Guardian):

Many of the other charts detail the results by category, such as age category for this one:

I always enjoy a color gradient to display margin of error.

Opioid seizures at US borders are mostly fentanyl nowadays (Reuters). The chemically cheap to produce substance has stormed into the country, leaving thousands of corpses in the streets.

It is much stronger than heroin, much more addictive too. But since its introduction on the market a few years ago, fentanyl has completely overruled heroin:

Fentanyl is much more space-efficient to produce than heroin. Where you need 50 hectares to produce 1 kg of heroin, 1 hectare would suffice for this amount of fentanyl:

That’s all VDS Week’s Digest! 🎯

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