Author Archives: datajournalism395

The terrible numbers that grow with each mass shooting

Washington Post August 2019

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

RELATED

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 167 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include domestic shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

Active Shootings in the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal, April, 2019

Active-shooter incidents around the U.S. fell slightly last year, but they remained at the second highest level since 2000, according to new data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Deadly incidents in 2018 included the shooting at a Parkland, Fla., high school, the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Borderline Bar and Grill shooting in Thousand Oaks, Calif. In total, there were 27 incidents around the country last year, leaving 85 people dead and 128 wounded. That compares with 30 shootings in 2017, the deadliest year in the FBI’s records.

Between 2000 and 2018, there have been 277 active-shooter events, which have killed 884 and injured 1,544, according to the FBI. These shootings have taken place in 44 states and Washington, D.C., in churches, workplaces and neighborhoods, and at all hours of the day.

Slavery’s growth, in charts: How ’20 and odd’ became millions

USA Today

Just over a decade after the Virginia Colony was settled, a ship — the San Juan Bautista — set sail from Angola with an estimated 350 kidnapped Africans aboard. It was bound for Mexico as part of the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade.

A twist of fate ended this torturous journey on the colony’s shores for more than 20 of the Bautista’s enslaved Angolans. Their landing would presage a trade and industry built on African labor that would reach a staggering scale in the United States over 200 years:

Serena Williams Reaches for the Top

New York Times September 7, 2019

Serena Williams will face Bianca Andreescu of Canada in the United States Open final on Saturday in a quest to notch her 24th Grand Slam singles title, which would equal the mark of Margaret Court, above, who has held sole possession of the women’s record for decades.

The women at the top of the list of Grand Slam titles span many eras of tennis history, starting from a time when these championships were not considered the absolute currency that they are now when discussing the greatest players ever.

Social media outpaces print newspapers as a news source

Pew Research Center  December, 2018

Social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans: One-in-five U.S. adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers

Social media’s small edge over print emerged after years of steady declines in newspaper circulation and modest increases in the portion of Americans who use social media, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year.

Overall, television is still the most popular platform for news consumption – even though its use has declined since 2016. News websites are the next most common source, followed by radio, and finally social media sites and print newspapers. And when looking at online news use combined – the percentage of Americans who get news often from either news websites or social media – the web has closed in on television as a source for news (43% of adults get news often from news websites or social media, compared with 49% for television).

Among the three different types of TV news asked about, local TV is the most popular – 37% get news there often, compared with 30% who get cable TV news often and 25% who often watch national evening network news shows.

For the first time, we also asked respondents if they got news from a streaming device on their TV – 9% of U.S. adults said that they do so often. There is a large amount of overlap between those who stream TV news and those who get news on broadcast television – a majority of those who get news from streaming TV often (73%) also say that they get news often on broadcast or cable TV.

Is A 40-Homer Season A Big Deal Anymore?

From 538 August 2019

According to data from Baseball-Reference.com, Alonso’s blast in Kansas City marked the first time that four hitters have reached 40 or more homers through their teams’ 125th game played since 2001, when it was accomplished by Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Luis Gonzalez and Jim Thome. It was just the third time in Major League Baseball history,1 with 1998 marking the other occasion (Sosa, Mark McGwire, Ken Griffey Jr, Greg Vaughn). Bonds hit 54 home runs through 125 games in 2001, the most in history.

The baseball world hasn’t witnessed a home run race like this since the height of the steroid era.

When Mets star Pete Alonso set the National League rookie home run record on Sunday, he joined Mike Trout, Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger in this season’s 40-homer club … in the middle of August.

Total home runs are on pace to shatter the MLB record this season, and three of the top four seasons by total home runs have come in the past four years. But until this year, individual season totals had fallen short of those of the steroid era. Though Giancarlo Stanton made it to 59 homers in 2017, the last hitters to reach 60 were Bonds and Sosa in 2001. Perhaps after 20-plus years of wondering what to do with homers of the late 1990s and early 2000s, this generation will have to wrestle how to place today’s homer binge, thought to be fueled by livelier balls and higher launch angles, in context.

Which countries have had the most Nobel prize winners?

Guardian News & Media Limited October 2016


It has been a good year for British brains, which make up half the recipients of Nobel prizes in 2016 to date (the economics prize will be announced on Monday, while the literature prize comes later in the year).

British trio David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz received the 2016 physics prize, while Sir Fraser Stoddart shared in the chemistry prize, helping to boost the number of awards the UK has received in these categories to 23 and 24 respectively.

Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns

From The New York Times August 2, 2019

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far.

This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.

Mr. Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid. The map above shows the breadth of Mr. Sanders’s roster of donors across the United States.

A map that includes the rest of the Democratic field without Mr. Sanders offers a picture of where the other major candidates are picking up donors. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading progressive in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.