Month: April 2021

Which color scale to use when visualizing data

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://blog.datawrapper.de/which-color-scale-to-use-in-data-vis/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

But when looking at data visualizations, I noticed that the decision of which color scale to use is often not as obvious as many of these data vis books make us believe. Some data visualizations are using sequential color palettes, although they’re visualizing categories. Or the same data is visualized with a diverging color scale in one publication and with a sequential one in the next. And sometimes with classed and other times with unclassed gradients.

What are the rules, the challenges, and the trade-offs?

Let’s find out.

The next three parts of this series provide you with a “decision tree” – a Choose Your Own Adventure of data vis – by asking three questions:

Part 2: When should you use a qualitative and when a quantitative color scale?

Part 3: If you decided to use a quantitative color scale – when should you use a sequential and when a diverging one?

Part 4: If you decided to use a quantitative color scale – when should you use a classed and when an unclassed one?

Author(s): Lisa Charlotte Rost

Publication Date: 16 March 2021

Publication Site: Datawrapper

Biden Said His Tax Hikes Would Only Affect the Rich. He Can’t Keep That Promise.

Mary Pat Campbell
Biden Said His Tax Hikes Would Only Affect the Rich. He Can’t Keep That Promise.

Excerpt:

It’s time for the Democrats who elect presidents that promise not to jack up taxes on anybody but the rich to come to terms with something: These politicians can’t continue to spend that much money without raising taxes on nearly everyone, and that includes some regressive taxes. I don’t like it, since I’d prefer the size and scope of government to be significantly smaller—but this reality is not optional.

Here’s another reason why Biden was never going to be able to keep his promise: He already announced his intention to increase the corporate income tax from the current 21 percent to 28 percent. The reality here is that the corporations that he says are going to send bigger checks to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after the tax hike aren’t the ones who actually shoulder this heavier tax burden.

Author(s): Veronique de Rugy

Publication Date: 1 April 2021

Publication Site: Reason

New Milliman report highlights mental health care utilization during COVID-19 pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://wellbeingtrust.org/news/new-milliman-report-highlights-mental-health-care-utilization-during-covid-19-pandemic/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Like utilization for non-Covid-related physical health care, utilization of mental health services dropped significantly when COVID-19 took hold in the United States in early 2020. However, in evaluating those dips, the use of care involving mental health conditions fell less than other kinds of care.

People with a mental health diagnosis were less willing to forego care during COVID-19’s peak. When restrictions began to be lifted in June 2020, visits to primary care offices by those with a mental health diagnosis actually rose above 2019 levels.

With the exception of Medicare beneficiaries, when remote health care utilization was factored into individuals’ overall behavioral health care utilization numbers, there were primarily year-over-year increases across all insured populations. Mental health care utilization increased among the Medicaid population between 2019 and 2020, and only decreased by 1% in March and May among the commercially insured population.

Publication Date: 16 March 2021

Publication Site: Well Being Trust

Error-riddled data sets are warping our sense of how good AI really is

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1021619/ai-data-errors-warp-machine-learning-progress/

Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.14749.pdf

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Yes, but: In recent years, studies have found that these data sets can contain serious flaws. ImageNet, for example, contains racist and sexist labels as well as photos of people’s faces obtained without consent. The latest study now looks at another problem: many of the labels are just flat-out wrong. A mushroom is labeled a spoon, a frog is labeled a cat, and a high note from Ariana Grande is labeled a whistle. The ImageNet test set has an estimated label error rate of 5.8%. Meanwhile, the test set for QuickDraw, a compilation of hand drawings, has an estimated error rate of 10.1%.

Author(s): Karen Hao

Publication Date: 1 April 2021

Publication Site: MIT Tech Review

Vaccine Passports: Here’s How Excelsior Pass Works

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.governing.com/now/Vaccine-Passports-Heres-How-Excelsior-Pass-Works.html

Excerpt:

The U.S. has its first official vaccine passport.

New York’s Excelsior Pass, developed by IBM, is essentially a simple digital wallet that can be accessed on mobile devices, which holds three items: your name, a QR code and a green check mark.

The idea is that people can use the app to prove to somebody — say, a ticket-taker at the door of a sports stadium, an airline or the staff at a large event — that they’ve received a vaccine against COVID-19. In actuality, the app can also prove that somebody’s received a negative test for the disease.

Author(s): Ben Miller

Publication Date: 8 April 2021

Publication Site: Governing

Visualizing Biden’s $1.52 Trillion Budget Proposal for 2022

Mary Pat Campbell
Visualizing Biden’s $1.52 Trillion Budget Proposal for 2022

Graphic:

Excerpt:

One of the biggest boosts in spending is for education. The proposed $29.8 billion would be a 41% increase from 2021. The extra funds would support students in high-poverty schools, as well as children with disabilities.

Health and human services is also a top priority in Biden’s budget, perhaps unsurprisingly given the global pandemic. But the boost in funds extends beyond disease control. Biden’s budget allocates $1.6 billion towards mental health grants and $10.7 billion to help stop the opioid crisis.

There are increases across all major budget categories, but defense will see the smallest increase from 2021 spending, at 2%. It’s worth noting that defense is also the biggest budget category by far, and with a total of $715 billion allocated, the budget lists deterring threats from China and Russia as a major goal.

Author(s): Carmen Ang

Publication Date: 9 April 2021

Publication Site: Visual Capitalist

Embrace the Grind

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/

Excerpt:

For example, I once joined a team maintaining a system that was drowning in bugs. There were something like two thousand open bug reports. Nothing was tagged, categorized, or prioritized. The team couldn’t agree on which issues to tackle. They were stuck essentially pulling bugs at random, but it was never clear if that issue was important.. New bug reports couldn’t be triaged effectively because finding duplicates was nearly impossible. So the open ticket count continued to climb. The team had been stalled for months. I was tasked with solving the problem: get the team unstuck, get reverse the trend in the open ticket count, come up with a way to eventually drive it down to zero.

So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues – one page of paper for each issue. I read each page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. I wrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from one stack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; I imagined I was Ben Affleck in The Accountant. I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized.

Author(s): Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Publication Date: 7 April 2021

Publication Site: Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Why Delaware is the sexiest place in America to incorporate a company

Mary Pat Campbell
Why Delaware is the sexiest place in America to incorporate a company

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Let’s say you run a tennis ball company in California that rakes in $100m/year in net income.

In California, you’ll pay a state income tax (8.84% of net income) — and possibly an alternative minimum tax (6.65%) — in addition to the federal corporate tax rate of 21%.

By incorporating in Delaware, though, you can likely save millions in taxes with something called the “Delaware loophole.”

In Delaware, intangible assets — think trademarks, copyrights, and leases — are free from taxation. Companies will often transfer these assets to a Delaware subsidiary and pay their own subsidiary for the rights to use said assets.

Author(s): Zachary Crockett

Publication Date: 10 April 2021

Publication Site: The Hustle

Don’t Mistake Accounting for Economics

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/dont-mistake-accounting-for-economics/

Excerpt:

There’s one mistake that’s particularly common and damaging. Too many observers try to derive economic principles from accounting principles. This is flat-out wrong. The reason is simple: Economics is not accounting. Economists try to understand the causal relationships in commerce and government. Accountants document stocks and flows in an orderly fashion. Economics obviously makes use of accounting, and accounting can be improved through knowledge of economics, but they’re not the same thing.

The most egregious abuses of economics that we see today start with an accounting identity — a true statement or equation — but end with an absurd economic claim. Importantly, an identity is true by construction. Based on the definitions of the variables, the formulation must be so. But it doesn’t say anything about the real world. It certainly doesn’t capture the causal relationships among those variables.

Author(s): Alexander William Salter

Publication Date: 9 April 2021

Publication Site: National Review

How ‘excess deaths’ show COVID’s real impact, and point to better ways of combating pandemics

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://nationalpost.com/health/how-excess-deaths-show-covids-real-impact-and-point-to-better-ways-of-combating-pandemics

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Canada saw about 42 excess deaths per 100,000 people by the fall of 2020, according to calculations from Ode’s team at Oxford.

In comparison, there were 132 per 100,000 in the U.S. during 2020, 100 in England and Wales, 33 in Germany and 175 excess deaths per 100,000 in Poland.

Perhaps most interesting were the minority of countries that have managed to keep the coronavirus at bay with a variety of public health measures.

Australia saw a three per cent decrease in excess deaths in 2020, New Zealand a six per cent reduction, while deaths in Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore were flat or lower, according to Karlinsky’s list. His source data were slightly different than those used in the Oxford study, but all the excess-death monitoring projects, including ones run by the Economist magazine and Financial Times newspaper, generally line up.

Author(s): Tom Blackwell

Publication Date: 9 April 2021

Publication Site: National Post

How to keep thousands of COVID-19-related lawsuits from creating a liability crisis

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.rstreet.org/2021/03/29/how-to-keep-thousands-of-covid-19-related-lawsuits-from-creating-a-liability-crisis/

Excerpt:

Younger, populist, anti-corporate juries are more prone to make larger awards than baby boomer jury pools. Plaintiff attorneys making good use of the “reptile theory” to provoke jurors to punish defendants painted as dangerous to society have led to staggeringly large verdicts. The combined impact of these trends has led to more and larger lawsuits, as well as year-over-year increases in “nuclear verdicts” — verdicts in excess of $10 million.

Some elements of the COVID-19 litigation torrent fit squarely in Buffet’s meaning of social inflation: expansion of what insurance policies cover. To be sure, the plurality of the 10,000 coronavirus suits filed involve insurance coverage litigation, with plaintiffs seeking coverage for business losses in policies where insurers maintain coverage does not exist.

Author(s): Jerry Theodorou

Publication Date: 29 March 2021

Publication Site: R Street

Bricks Without Straw?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.rstreet.org/2021/03/30/bricks-without-straw/

Excerpt:

Credit analytics firm FICO posits that the reason for the correlation of credit history and claim probability is that “individuals who closely and cautiously monitor and manage their finances tend to also take better care of their cars and homes and are, generally, more diligent in their risk management habits.” Because such individuals are found across demographic classifications, the discrimination argument becomes hard to uphold.

If insurers find that credit scores have bearing on accident propensity, insurers should be allowed to use them. Preventing insurers from deploying basic tools required to generate appropriate risk-adjusted prices leads to mispricing of risk, harming insurance buyers as well as insurers. What is more, such deprivation leads to unintended negative consequences—an unfair socialization of risk, leaving customers either overcharged or undercharged. Executive fiat prohibiting insurers from accessing the tools of their trade is tantamount to Pharaoh ordering the Israelites of old to make bricks without straw. Bad business, bad policy.

Author(s): Jerry Theodorou

Publication Date: 30 March 2021

Publication Site: R Street