Data visualization

Different states pursue different tax strategies. Most rely on sales or income tax for most of their money, though there are outliers. Natural-resource-heavy states like Wyoming, North Dakota and Alaska rely on “other” taxes. Corporation-heavy Delaware gets a disproportionate amount of revenue from licenses. Below is an initial look at % of revenue from each source […]

In my previous post on house price-to-rent ratios in major US markets, I looked at price-to-rent in different zip codes compared to each other. In it you can see where certain areas look over- or undervalued in terms of price-to-rent ratio. That analysis shows a lot of pertinent data in one place, but you’re stuck in time. […]

My wife and I are buying (and selling) a house, and the metric I always return to is price-to-rent ratio. Sure, the real estate agent will show you comps for similar homes in the area. And all your friends, family, in-laws will chime in as to what they think a proper price. But price-to-rent ratio […]

On Jan 19th, Jen commented on my first school shooting data visualization, “Note that there are no incidents in Vermont, one of the states with the most lenient gun laws. Just saying.” That’s an interesting point, and nothing in my school shootings data visualization did anything to answer whether gun control laws, or gun ownership […]

A lot of fuss has been made over the map below that shows school shootings since Newtown. This visualization was put out by Everytown for Gun Safety, and republished in the Huffington Post. The problem? The below dots represent all shootings even near schools, even those that didn’t result in a death. Now, I don’t […]

With most data visualizations, interactivity is wasted on your visitors – they take a look at the graph, get the gist, then move on. But there are times when you want interactivity. Mainly, this is when you want it to act as a reference. Below are some visualizations using census data. I transformed the raw […]

First of all, every election season I devour Nate Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight.com, and I loved his book The Signal and the Noise. So it’s with great pleasure, and maybe a little regret, that I get to show the folks at fivethirtyeight a thing or two about data visualization. I just read the article Dear Mona, I Masturbate […]

I ran across an interesting data visualization using Tableau on labor force participation. The source of this data is the Federal Reserve of Atlanta’s macroblog. Both articles start with a distribution graph – why aren’t people in the labor force by age. There are problems with each:  Macroblog     AggregatedData      Problem: Bar graphs are […]