Rates of HIV diagnoses are falling in cities across the country like New York, Philadelphia and right here in Chicago.
That’s the good news. The bad news: cases of the virus are cropping up more and more in rural areas like West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia.
Reset sits down with Steven Thrasher, assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, for more on this issue.
We also check in with Jill Hopkins, the host of the Morning Amp on WBEZ’s sister station Vocalo. She introduces us to some of the talented folks around the city that are being highlighted in Vocalo’s series “This Is What Chicago Sounds Like.”
50,000 nurses? 40 new hospitals? Big corporate tax rises? Childcare promises? Election pledges might sound good, but do they stand up to scrutiny? In the run up to the General Election on 12th December, Tim Harford takes his scalpel of truth to the inflamed appendix of misinformation.
It will be all smiles at the NATO summit today in London--but many of them will be forced. Behind the scenes, the alliance’s leaders are arguing about what its purpose should be. We also look at the disputed data behind the idea that inequality has been rising inexorably in recent years. And how a novel way to reduce cow and sheep burps could help in the fight against climate change. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/radiooffer
Cyber Monday set a record as the biggest online shopping day in US history — but the real winner this year is Shopify. Jack Dorsey is busy being the CEO of both Twitter and Square, but now he wants to live in Africa for 6 months. And McDonald’s is looking to enter the Chicken Sandwich Wars, but its biggest challenge comes from the inside: Franchisees.
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Senator Cory Booker still hasn’t made the cut for the next Democratic debate, despite having all the moderate bona fides that a suburban voter could want. Why has Booker failed to pop up in the polls?
In which one of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting atones for her gossip scandals at court by inventing a brand new meal, and John blames museum docents for all his schedule problems. Certificate #48479.
Senator Cory Booker still hasn’t made the cut for the next Democratic debate, despite having all the moderate bona fides that a suburban voter could want. Why has Booker failed to pop up in the polls?
Comet 2I/Borisov will reach its closest approach to the sun on December 8, 2019. We talk to planetary astronomer Michele Bannister about where the heck this comet came from, and what it tells us about our galaxy. Follow Maddie on Twitter — she's @maddie_sofia. And email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.
However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.
In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.
