Hey folks, Wow, I really didn’t expect my overview of Positron to resonate with so many people last week on YouTube! I’ll work on coming up with another video showing Virtual Studio Code (VS Code) in action. As others have mentioned in the episode’s comments, I’m not really sure why Posit is building Positron instead of making things easier within VS Code for R users. To me the need for an IDE that allows people to use multiple programming languages is a red herring - VS Code does that already. Maybe I’m missing something. Ultimately, it’s important to remember that Posit is a company and they must have a business case for Positron. But… do they really want to take on Microsoft, the makers of VS Code? After deleting my Twitter account a couple of months ago, I’ve been lurking on BlueSky waiting for it to take off. Honestly, I don’t really have the time to be scanning social media feeds. But something I miss from Twitter is the community that would post cool figures. I decided to go looking for some of those figures on BlueSky yesterday and found the feed of Tom Calver who is a Data Editor at The Times (of London?). I found this cool figure, which was part of an article he wrote about health care spending in the UK’s National Health System (NHS): I thought this was a fascinating plot. Of course, any health care-related figure has to include the US since we are good at making others look better. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about why countries can improve their life expectancy without spending more money (e.g., Italy and Japan) or why other countries spend more with no or little benefit (e.g., US, Germany, and UK). Something I like about this plot is that Claver shows the passage of time with a trail of smaller points. On the web, this is an interactive figure that you can hover over a point and get a pop-up to tell you about the point. I’ll focus on the static parts of the plot. This is a bubble plot that you could generate using First, the size legend is built into the data. Do you see it? For the Germany series of points the smallest point has 2000 next to it and the largest has 2023 next to it. A common theme in recent newsletters has been looking for ways to build legends into the data so that the reader doesn’t have to look off to a margin to understand what they are seeing. I really like this effect. I’d probably add this legend with Second, it is interesting that the older points appear to fall on top of the newer points. Except for the 2023 points, which fall on top of the 2019 points (the 2020-2022 data were excluded). Doing this with Third, this plot doesn’t have tick marks on the axes, but does have grid lines on both axes. This is another emerging theme. Why include tick marks if you have grid lines? I’m not generally a fan of grid lines, but I have to agree with these developers that if you’re using them you don’t need the tick marks. I think they’re extraneous. Fourth, this plot puts the x and y-axis titles at the outer reach of the axes. We see “Life expectancy” in the upper left corner and “Per-capita spend” in the bottom right corner. I’m not 100% what I think of this yet. I kind of like it for the x-axis because it keeps the title from getting lost in the caption at the bottom. What do you think? I’d remove the typical titles with Fifth, I like how “UK” has a red background with white font in the title. In the past, I’ve highlighted a variable by changing the title text to the relevant color. I suspect the background color helps “UK” pop more than if “UK” was written in red font, even if it were bolded. I would likely pull this off using Finally, there are a few odds and ends. Something that stands out as weird to me is how the US’s 2000 to 2002 points for fall outside the plotting window. Why? Regardless, we could pull this off using If you want to take a swing at making this figure, you should be able to get the life expectancy data from OECD and the healthcare expenditure data from the WHO.
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Hey folks! As I’m writing this newsletter the US government is in shutdown mode with no clear signs that things will get going anytime soon. I’ll withhold my own political take except to say that my family has been running without an official budget for about 25 years. I don’t recommend it, but we know basically how much money goes to our mortgage, insurance, groceries, charities, etc. and how much money we generally have left over. Somehow we still are able to spend money on living a pretty...
Hey folks! This week I have a figure for you from the New York Times based on a poll they did with Siena that describes Americans’ sentiments concerning Israel’s actions in their war with Gaza. What does it say to me? This plot is saying that more Americans think that Israel is intentionally killing civilians than they did in December 2023. The change in percentage of people in the other categories seems to decrease accordingly. What do you like? I love slope plots! I think they’re a great...
Hey folks, This week I have an interesting figure for you from the Financial Times from an e-mail newsletter they distribute each week describing some visualization related to climate change. Before reading further, go ahead and spend a few minutes with the image. What does it say to you? What do you like? What don’t you like about it? How do you think you would go about making it in R? I’d encourage you to write down any of your answers to these questions before reading what I have to say....