Trump Tourism Effects
In the past day or two on social media I kept seeing this graph from a Semafor story on the declining volume of international visitors to the United States.
Semafor Graph.
It seems to show, and was being remarked on as showing, that the second Trump administration has been responsible for a drop in visitors from abroad from some countries on a scale comparable to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. My first thought was “that can’t be true”. And indeed it is not true. I mean, the pandemic shut down air travel almost completely for a while. The current administration’s actions have been terrible in many ways and led to direct, negative consequences for tourism, too. But they haven’t been on that scale. Something’s wrong with the graph. ❧ Continue reading…
Research Workflows
I’m teaching MPTC again this semester and have been developing a few workflow slides. Here’s a popular one.
The Scientific Process.
Now if you’ll excuse me there’s a mandatory webinar I need to click through. ❧ Continue reading…
socviz 2.0.0 on CRAN
In anticipation of the second edition of Data Visualization, which is coming later this year from Princeton University Press, version 2.0.0 of my socviz package is now on CRAN. The update removes some functions that aren’t needed anymore and adds a couple of sample datasets. ❧ Continue reading…
Ihaka Lecture
I gave the first of this year’s Ihaka Lectures at the University of Auckland this past July. It revisited and partially updated things I’ve been talking about for the past eighteen months or so on trust in data visualization (and by extension in scientific work) in the light of the many challenges we presently face. ❧ Continue reading…
Zero Sum Problems
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber makes a passing observation about the Apple Sports app:
I’ve got some gripes about certain specific aspects of Apple Sports. Like, where does one even start to explain how much is wrong with their zero-sum visualization of team stats? Has anyone ever even seen a presentation like that before? Anyone?
That “Anyone” link lands over here. Hi everyone! The team stats image is quite confusing. It’s a summary of a game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder. I don’t know much about basketball, but I do know a bit about data visualization and in a pleasing coincidence my former student Josh Fink is the A-VP of Basketball Data Science for the Spurs. Here is the image that John objected to: ❧ Continue reading…