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Hey FATTIES!
A little Vargas/Daniel can’t be missed in this week’s issue.
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NEW GRAPHIC for Businessweek. When you search for something on Google, its algorithms will usually respond with suggestions for what it thinks you’re looking for based on other popular searches. It’s a helpful tool, but also a window into our collective psyche. Try Googling “Why” and see what comes up. The cascade of suggestions that Google generates can also feel less like asking for a professional or qualified answer and more like an exercise in Dadaism poetry.
Above, a few inspired from googlepoetics.com
—jennifer -
Nearly three years after Congress ordered public companies to reveal their chief executive officer-to-worker pay ratios under the Dodd-Frank law, the numbers still aren’t public. To get a sense of what such ratios could reveal, we conducted an experiment. It compared the disclosed CEO compensation mandated by the SEC—including salary, bonus, perks, changes in pension accruals, and the value of stock-based awards—with U.S. government data on average worker pay and benefits by industry. (Most companies don’t disclose actual payroll information for employees.)
—jennifer
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A graphic of sorts.
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Businessweek: Alpha Dads: Men Get Serious About Work-Life Balance
A March 2013 Pew Research study about modern parenthood found that nearly equal proportions of parents were twisted up in knots trying to “do it all.” Fifty percent of working fathers and 56 percent of working mothers found it “very” or “somewhat” difficult to balance work and family, according to Pew, while 48 percent of working fathers and 52 percent of working mothers responded that they’d prefer to be home with their children, but needed to work for the income. Men spend three times as much time with their children as their grandfathers did. Yet most employers haven’t acknowledged this shift.
(via ilovecharts)
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In 2002 the first Hellfire missile was shot from a U.S.-operated Predator drone at suspected terrorists in Yemen. Since then an estimated 480 more unmanned airstrikes have been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. Thanks to Josh Begley’s labor of love and reports from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we had the first comprehensive data set on every lethal U.S. drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. So now that we’ve got a mile-long spreadsheet, what do we do with it?
We’d been eyeing these beautiful “honeycomb” maps for awhile, and because the Bureau notes it’s often difficult to pinpoint the exact latitude and longitude of the strikes, we thought binning them into hexagons would be better way to visualize the data than a heat map or proportional circle map. Kevin Schaul’s lovely Binify made this much easier, but our first Python endeavor was still a bit of pain. No matter, try to remain calm: Businessweek is binning.
All three countries:
Just Pakistan:
Once we’d decided on the right density of hexagons, we went to work on designing the map. There were LOTS of iterations with shapes, sizes and colors thanks to Lisa Rost, our intern extraordinaire, a.k.a The Teutonic Machine:
Hexagonal maps are tricky and work best when you have a bunch of data points spread over a large area. Our data, however, was pretty concentrated in one remote chunk of Pakistan. We maybe should’ve kept the empty hexagon bins in the final design so our data points didn’t just become floating polygons, but we still think this was a better option than giant blobs piled on top of each other. We’re pretty happy with the way things turned out both in print and in our interactive version.
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More pay for less work? If you’re working on prying resources out of mother gaia, then yes, that’s your steez. With illos by Dorothy Gambrell.
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Dorothy Gambrell illustrates everything you wanted to know about California’s prison labor program, but were afraid to ask. They can only sell inmate-made goods to the state, and if the state cuts back, those prisoners lose their jobs. Jeez, in jail AND laid off? Can this prison sentence get any worse????
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Just found out that while I was sleeping in Berlin every magazine designer had congregated to New York for the yearly SPD Gala. Businessweek won a few awards, amongst them a GOLD for Infographics!
Illustrated by Tracy Ma and Emily Keegin for the election issue.
Of the finalists we had two in the final five—the other being the history of video games. BIG CONGRATS to Francesco Franchi from IL, who picked up the silver medal for their AMAZING terrorism map.
