Posts tagged explainer

Know Your Thobe The afternoon explainer via Brownbook. FYI, I’ve only worn it Saudi style. — Michael

Know Your Thobe

The afternoon explainer via Brownbook.

FYI, I’ve only worn it Saudi style. — Michael

Who’s Who in Syria, an Illustrated Explainer Slate’s running an illustrated explainer of who’s who in Syria’s power family with brief overviews of how they got there. So, for example, you have Bashar “the accidental dictator,” his younger brother “the elite army commander” and first cousin Hafez Makhlouf “the spymaster” among others. Image: Detail from Syria’s First Family, via Slate.

Who’s Who in Syria, an Illustrated Explainer

Slate’s running an illustrated explainer of who’s who in Syria’s power family with brief overviews of how they got there.

So, for example, you have Bashar “the accidental dictator,” his younger brother “the elite army commander” and first cousin Hafez Makhlouf “the spymaster” among others.

Image: Detail from Syria’s First Family, via Slate.

Hadoop, Say What?

With an ecosystem of components with names like Pig, Oozie, Sqoop and Zookeeper among others, it can be difficult understanding what exactly the software framework Hadoop actually is.

Fortunately, Edd Dumbill at O’Reilly Radar gives a great explainer:

Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. You’ll hear it mentioned often, along with associated technologies such as Hive and Pig…

…Hadoop brings the ability to cheaply process large amounts of data, regardless of its structure. By large, we mean from 10-100 gigabytes and above. How is this different from what went before?

Dumbill goes on to core components such as MapReduce, HDFS, and then explains others that improve programmability, data access, coordination and workflow, management and deployment, and machine learning.

Interested in more? Here are some tutorials to get you started:

Visualizing the 99%

The Guardian put together this animated explainer about wealth distribution in the United States.

Click through to see the data behind the animation.

Learn what redistricting is all about through this ‘school house rock’ style music video made by Andrew Bean and Dave Holmes in partnership with ProPublica.

propublica.org

A Year in the Life of Dow Jones When the Dow plunged yesterday I was flipping through cable news and couldn’t find anyone, anywhere who would contextualize what the numbers meant.  Yes, 630 plus points (or about 5.5%) were lost from the day before but how did that compare to the year? For that matter, where were we last August? Enter data gleaned from Wolfram|Alpha. Above is the monthly low, mean and high of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from August 2010 to yesterday. For those wondering, here’s a flashback of past August lows: August 2011: 10810 August 2010: 9986 August 2009: 9135 August 2008: 11284 August 2007: 12846 August 2006: 11076 August 2005: 10397  Now watch as we jump back in time a bit: August 1995: 4581 August 1985: 1313 August 1975: 791 August 1925: 125 And all that because the cable wouldn’t tell me that one little thing I wanted to know.

A Year in the Life of Dow Jones

When the Dow plunged yesterday I was flipping through cable news and couldn’t find anyone, anywhere who would contextualize what the numbers meant. 

Yes, 630 plus points (or about 5.5%) were lost from the day before but how did that compare to the year? For that matter, where were we last August?

Enter data gleaned from Wolfram|Alpha. Above is the monthly low, mean and high of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from August 2010 to yesterday.

For those wondering, here’s a flashback of past August lows:

  • August 2011: 10810
  • August 2010: 9986
  • August 2009: 9135
  • August 2008: 11284
  • August 2007: 12846
  • August 2006: 11076
  • August 2005: 10397 

Now watch as we jump back in time a bit:

  • August 1995: 4581
  • August 1985: 1313
  • August 1975: 791
  • August 1925: 125

And all that because the cable wouldn’t tell me that one little thing I wanted to know.

Colbert Gets His Super Pac with Media Implications

The Federal Elections Commission today approved comedian Stephen Colbert’s application to form a super PAC. Super PAC’s came on the scene in 2010 after US Supreme Court rulings in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v Federal Election Commission struck down spending and contribution limits to campaigns. 

The difference between a “normal” Political Action Committee and a super PAC is in the disclosure laws and uncapped “issue” expenditures, meaning a super PAC can spend whatever it can raise on targeted issues but not donate directly to a campaign.

Sarah Mimms of the Atlantic outlines the implications this could have on media involvement in US elections.

The request comes down to one essential issue: whether Viacom can legally donate production costs, airtime and use of Colbert’s staff to create ads for the so-called super PAC, to be played both on “The Colbert Report” and as paid advertisements other networks and shows.

If the FEC grants Colbert a press exemption, the decision could have a drastic effect on media involvement in federal elections, potentially opening the door for media outlets that employ politicians as commentators to aid favored candidates through undisclosed contributions. Those figures include Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who founded American Crossroads, and former Ark. Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) who heads “Huck PAC” and hosts a show on Fox News.

Several campaign finance reform advocates are expressing concern over three proposed changes the FEC will consider on Thursday. Granting Colbert’s request in full, they argue, would allow media companies to anonymously fund the political activities of their employees, under the protection of the FEC’s press exemption…

…Granting the exemption would produce what the reformers called “a sweeping and damaging impact on disclosure laws,” which would allow media companies to fund employees’ political activities anonymously. Politicians who are employed by media companies could use their television shows as platforms to raise unlimited funds for their PACs, without having to disclose it, the reform groups said.

H/T: topherchris & NPR

The afternoon explainer: A caffeinated romp through all things coffee.

“Caffeine is the worlds most used psychoactive drug. And with good reason. It’s pure awesome.”

Via CGP Grey.

Run Time - 4:20.

Oil Spill amounts in perspective

flowingdata.com

Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Mirror Wikileaks and it Will Not Fall.

Or something like that.

On Sunday, Wikileaks began releasing classified documents from Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba:

These memoranda, which contain [the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay] recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held, or should be released (transferred to their home governments, or to other governments) contain a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 171 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever).

When Wikileaks last dumped a trove of sensitive documents, they were hit hard by a Distributed Denial of Service Attack that essentially took the site offline.

Half a year later, Wikileaks and its volunteers are now using the elasticity and redundancy of the Web to prevent DDoS attacks from preventing access to information again. How they’re doing it is through the use of mirrors.

What does that mean?

A mirror is simply a server that duplicates the data that is found on other servers. You can think of it as a type of file synchronization.

Commercial companies such as Amazon do this with their Elastic Cloud computing. The logistics are different (Amazon is duplicating data instances across their own servers) but the concept is the same: have multiple copies of information available across the globe so that if anything happens at one node, another can serve the data.

The video above visualizes the Wikileaks global mirror ecosystem via Google Earth. We recommend viewing it full screen so you can see the details of what’s being shown.

Gerald Herbert, photographer for the Associated Press, looks back via his photographs at the Gulf Coast Oil Spill one year later.

Via PBS NewsHour.

Run Time: 4:13.

It’s called datajournalism, but it isn’t just about slapping a pretty pie chart on a news story. Data journalists weave compelling narratives, often of the investigative variety, using statistics and numbers—and not, say, press statements or interviews—as their primary sources.
Datajournalism: Reporting the Truth, in Numbers via DesignTaxi.com

designtaxi.com

Tis the season of US federal budgets and threats of government shutdowns. With that in mind, CNN has a great explainer about, um — how to put this delicately — how informationally innocent we Americans are when it comes to what’s actually in the federal budget. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday, most Americans think that the government spends a lot more money than it actually does on such unpopular programs as foreign aid and public broadcasting… …According to the poll, on average, Americans estimate that foreign aid takes up 10 percent of the federal budget, and one in five think it represents about 30 percent of the money the government spends. But the actual figure is closer to one percent, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget from the 2010 fiscal year’s $3.5 trillion budget. OK. Let’s try more low-hanging fruit - funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our survey indicates nearly half of all Americans would like to see major cuts. According to our poll the public estimates that the government spent five percent of its budget last year on public television and radio. Not even close. The real answer is about one-tenth of one percent. For more examples of our American brand of indelible budgetary acumen: CNN Poll: Americans flunk budget IQ test.

Tis the season of US federal budgets and threats of government shutdowns.

With that in mind, CNN has a great explainer about, um — how to put this delicately — how informationally innocent we Americans are when it comes to what’s actually in the federal budget.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday, most Americans think that the government spends a lot more money than it actually does on such unpopular programs as foreign aid and public broadcasting…

…According to the poll, on average, Americans estimate that foreign aid takes up 10 percent of the federal budget, and one in five think it represents about 30 percent of the money the government spends. But the actual figure is closer to one percent, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget from the 2010 fiscal year’s $3.5 trillion budget.

OK. Let’s try more low-hanging fruit - funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Our survey indicates nearly half of all Americans would like to see major cuts.

According to our poll the public estimates that the government spent five percent of its budget last year on public television and radio.

Not even close. The real answer is about one-tenth of one percent.

For more examples of our American brand of indelible budgetary acumen: CNN Poll: Americans flunk budget IQ test.