81–90 of 93 posts
This is awesome! You might really like All the News That's Fit to Sell which is a deep dive into the media economics behind why things are covered — it gives lots of color for why coverage is the way it is (there's a famous journalism saying: "If it bleeds, it leads" — which speaks to the readership/profits that come from covering vivid deaths) If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC…
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> A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year. The same thing could be said for the gun control narrative being pushed by the media and politicians. If gun deaths are classified as homicides and using CDC numbers, t…
I agree that the media is hyperbolizing gun violence, however that's a false equivalency. The "war on terror" is costly and only creates more terrorism... stoking public fear feeds back into the problem. Legislation could significantly reduce firearm abuse with negligible cost and no feedback loops.
Another good example that "data" is not always meaningful. The graphs help the idea "media are talking too much about terrorism". All deaths are not equal. Most of old people die naturally from an heart failure or cancer, that the natural process of death. Homicides and accidents are not natural but common. Terrorism is an exception, that's why it so much covered. 100 old people dying from cancer do not worth 1 minut…
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> Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods. It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
> reduce access to methods A sibling questioned the validity of this for suicide, and I agree. Anyone sufficiently motivated to kill themselves will find a way. Knife, rope, drug overdose, threaten a police officer, vehicular "accident", skydiving, move-to-Oregon (for legally assisted suicide, that is -- OR's a nice place :)), sit in the garage while the car is running... every single one of these things is something…
Also, you don't often see a knife, rope, car, drug overdose, skydiving, or assisted suicide used in a murder-suicide scenario. (Murder-suicide by car certainly happens, but not as often as with a gun.)
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> Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods. It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
> reduce access to methods A sibling questioned the validity of this for suicide, and I agree. Anyone sufficiently motivated to kill themselves will find a way. Knife, rope, drug overdose, threaten a police officer, vehicular "accident", skydiving, move-to-Oregon (for legally assisted suicide, that is -- OR's a nice place :)), sit in the garage while the car is running... every single one of these things is something…
This is untrue, and it's dangerously untrue.
> The only thing reducing access to firearms will do is change the method of suicide.
Method substitution tends not to happen, or it takes some years to happen.
We know this from some natural experiments. For example, car exhaust fumes used to be a common method, and then we got cleaner engines and catalytic converters and again we saw a long lasting drop in deaths by suicide.
And even if every person did substitute a different method it's likely they'd be using a more survivable method.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods. It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
Reduce access to the methods to end ones life? Is this irony?
For example, in the UK this has meant phasing out some ineffective and dangerous medication; reducing the pack sizes of others; and encouraging doctors to safer prescribing of opioids.
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Fear of terrorism isn’t just fear of dying from terrorism. What was the economic damage or 9/11?
Pretty sure the actual economic damage ($250B) from 9/11 attacks was small compared to the self-inflicted economic damage that followed in the form of market reactions $1T and wars $2T. In other words, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process. ^_^
Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process. ^_^
This is great! Can you give any insight into your charts? I have similar data sets that I would love to represent like this. It sounds like you already mentioned using chart.js. Anything else that you use, specifically for the first few charts with the time slider? Anything crazy that you needed to do?
I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-...
If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist](https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the easiest to get up and running.
While charts.js is a little more interactive, it was a little painful to get up and running.
The time slider is just an input slider some jQuery I wrote that dynamically loads up a new dataset and calls the redraw function in charts.js to load up a new chart.
Overall, as someone with entry-level experience in both manipulating data and web development, I found the overall process to be a little rough at first, but it got a lot better once I got the hang of the library.
In total, the entire website took me about a week, with 2 hours of work every day. So something like 15 hours, total?
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This is great! Can you give any insight into your charts? I have similar data sets that I would love to represent like this. It sounds like you already mentioned using chart.js. Anything else that you use, specifically for the first few charts with the time slider? Anything crazy that you needed to do?
To start with, I didn't know much about charting on the web before this project. (It's much harder than in Python :P) I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-... If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist]( https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/ ) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the…