Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
For The Upshot, Emily Badger and Francesca Paris compare the rates of existing mortgages against current rates for new loans. A stacked area chart shows the large share of existing rates that are lower, which means a lot of people aren’t so eager to move, relative to the past 20 years.
I’m in that dark maroon group. Higher mortgage rates, higher listing prices, and higher property taxes. Doesn’t seem fun.
Posted by in mortgage, Statistical Visualization, Upshot
NatureQuant processes and analyzes satellite imagery to quantify people’s access to nature. They call it a NatureScore. For the Washington Post, Harry Stevens mapped and charted the scores across the United States. At first glance, the map looks a lot like population density, but the better comparison is in how cities with similar population densities look next to each other.
Tags: cities, nature, NatureQuant, satellite imagery, Washington Post
Posted by in Cities, nature, NatureQuant, satellite imagery, Statistical Visualization, Washington Post
The World Happiness Report, published each year since 2012, just dropped for 2024. They focused on age and happiness this year. Overall, the United States ranked in the range from 17 to 29 among all countries, but was worse for young people. Finland was definitively at the top.
The visualizations are clinical, which is kind of sad given the topic of the report. Someone should collate the data and have some fun with it.
Posted by in happiness, rank, Statistical Visualization
AI is finding its way into the HR workflow to sift through resumes. This seems like a decent idea on the surface, until you realize that the models that the AI is built on lean more towards certain demographics. For Bloomberg, Leon Yin, Davey Alba, and Leonardo Nicoletti experimented with the OpenAI GPT showing a bias:
When asked to rank those resumes 1,000 times, GPT 3.5 — the most broadly-used version of the model — favored names from some demographics more often than others, to an extent that would fail benchmarks used to assess job discrimination against protected groups. While this test is a simplified version of a typical HR workflow, it isolated names as a source of bias in GPT that could affect hiring decisions. The interviews and experiment show that using generative AI for recruiting and hiring poses a serious risk for automated discrimination at scale.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia and Emily Badger model how colleges might promote diversity in admissions without (directly) considering race.
A set of scatter plots show a theoretical students plotted by parent income and SAT score. Select between SAT-only admissions or a process that considers factors such as low income or school poverty to see how the percentages change.
Tags: admissions, college, SAT, Upshot
Posted by in admissions, college, SAT, Statistical Visualization, Upshot
A title drop is when a movie mentions its own name during the film. Dominikus Baur and Alice Thudt analyzed thousands of scripts to calculate when and how often title drops occur:
Alright, so here’s the number you’ve all been waiting for (drumroll):
36.5% – so about a third – of movies have at least one title drop during their runtime.
Also, there’s a total of 277,668 title drops for all 26,965 title-dropping movies which means that there’s an average of 10.3 title drops per movie that title drops. If they do it, they really go for it.
They used barcode charts disguised as film to show when title drops occur in individual movies. A fisheye effect, which is often disorienting or decorative, comes in handy to highlight the drops.
Tags: Alice Thudt, dialogue, Dominikus Baur, movies, title
Posted by in Alice Thudt, dialogue, Dominikus Baur, movies, Statistical Visualization, title
Caitlin Clark, a basketball guard for the University of Iowa, has been steadily adding to her point total over the past four years. Clark broke the NCAA record this past week. But as we all know, it’s not official until there’s a step chart that shows the rise over time.
Tags: basketball, Caitlin Clark, Washington Post
Posted by in basketball, Caitlin Clark, Statistical Visualization, Washington Post
For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.
Tags: confidence, inflation, Nate Silver, New York Times, spending
Posted by in confidence, inflation, Nate Silver, New York Times, spending, Statistical Visualization
This chart by Eric Wallerstein for the Wall Street Journal shows expectations against reality. They often don’t match up.
See also: how rate projections change over time.
Tags: invest, rate, Wall Street Journal
Posted by in invest, rate, Statistical Visualization, Wall Street Journal
Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in South Carolina, announced Saturday that it captured compelling sonar images of what could be Earhart’s aircraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The discovery was made possible by a high-tech unmanned underwater drone and a 16-member crew, which surveyed more than 5,200 square miles of ocean floor between September and December.
Tags: airplane, Amelia Earhart, NPR, ocean
Posted by in airplane, Amelia Earhart, NPR, ocean, Statistical Visualization