patrickcain.ca

Magazine capacity – a do-over

Patrick Cain — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:27:01 +0000

I wasn’t happy with the way the component of our series on gun control loopholes on magazine capacity (how magazine limits for centre-fire semi-automatic rifles have shifted from five rounds to ten, then 15) came out, back in January – I thought it was the most important part of the package, but it got the least reader interest, and I could see why – it was basically a picture of a grey steel box with an explanation.

So we put our minds to the question of how to tell the story better. The answer seemed to be props – a mixture of showing and telling – so I bought two magazines and two sets of inert dummy rounds, 20 of 5.56 and six of .50 Beowulf. Then we set out to explain the story with a mixture of text and video, aiming the explanation at readers with a very basic or no knowledge of firearms.

We ended up with four videos embedded in the story, aimed at physically demonstrating how the loopholes work. I think it worked a lot better than the original, though it became obvious that I haven’t done a lot of video, and hadn’t filled a magazine in many years (IIRC since the summer of 1994).

The story is here.

Our gun control story at Question Period

Patrick Cain — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:23:28 +0000

Our gun control story on Global National last night

Patrick Cain — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:23:16 +0000

Today’s gun control story

Patrick Cain — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:13:16 +0000

Embedding tweets is a poor substitute for blogging properly, but here we are:

Outdated gun rules pose ‘risk to public safety,’ secret federal memo warns: globalnews.ca/news/581949/ou…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) June 3, 2013

Loopholes series in January argued that Canada’s gun control system had a growing number of bewildering loopholes 1/2 globalnews.ca/tag/loopholes/

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) June 3, 2013

Today’s story shows that senior officials at Public Safety had similar concerns: 2/2 globalnews.ca/news/581949/ou…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) June 3, 2013

Catching up

Patrick Cain — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:36:19 +0000

I’ve been neglecting this blog. Here is a Twitter-based roundup:

Five free data journalism tools recommended by @pcaintoronto from @globaldatadesk j-source.ca/article/five-f… ^tb

— J-Source (@jsource) April 23, 2013

On what makes @globaldatadesk unique in Canada j-source.ca/article/global… ^tb

— J-Source (@jsource) April 23, 2013

My new copy of @guardian‘s Facts are Sacred has shoutouts to @glen_mcgregor @pcaintoronto @thecribby @mckiedavid twitter.com/CarlNeustaedte…

— Carl Neustaedter (@CarlNeustaedter) April 25, 2013

@ipoliticsca Riding-level leadership data reveals much about strengths, flaws of #lpc‘s local ground game. Maps: bit.ly/153ZM0f

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) April 29, 2013

Riding-level maps look at voters per #lpc leadership voter. Atlantic+ON, strong, QC weak, West weak outside cities bit.ly/153ZM0f

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) April 29, 2013

After RCMP error, feds budget $260K for gun buyback; rifles could be converted to sub-machine guns ‘in minutes’ bit.ly/15ZO4Dk

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) May 1, 2013

Update: Searchable interactive: Where the banned weapons were, across Canada: globalnews.ca/news/525833/52…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) May 1, 2013

Graphic Monday this week is an interactive: 55 years of immigration to Canada by source country: globalnews.ca/news/556893/gr…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) May 13, 2013

Interactive map: the City’s list of Toronto’s 100 worst intersections for pedestrians. (Worst near the Sheppard IKEA) globalnews.ca/news/561990/gl…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) May 15, 2013

This is just terrific. Data journalism that led to real action: globalnews.ca/news/561990/gl…

— David Skok (@dskok) May 15, 2013

.@leslieyoung explains the 11-month FOI/data horror story behind #crudeawakening: paper records, weird grid systems globalnews.ca/news/572572/re…

— Patrick Cain (@pcaintoronto) May 22, 2013

Our Toronto student survey series

Patrick Cain — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:42:56 +0000

The third part (of three) of our series on the Toronto school board’s survey data was published this morning.

The project involved a lot of cross-platform collaboration with Global Toronto: I went out with a cameraman twice this week (can I say that being driven around for a story feels kind of decadent, and really easy to get used to?) and also reported off video filed by the TV side.

The series, with the accompanying TV pieces, looks like this:

Cyberbullying still rare, Toronto student survey shows Story | Video

How safe do Toronto students feel? Depends where they study Story | Video

60% more Toronto students have private tutors – in wealthy areas most of all Story | Video

Day One of our TDSB story on TV:

Patrick Cain — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:14:09 +0000

Link

The TDSB’s survey data broken down by school

Patrick Cain — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:20:53 +0000

Back in July of last year, we thought it might be useful to be able to work with the data from the Toronto public school board’s student census, an enormous effort that involves more than 100,000 students and their parents. They’re asked a wide range of questions, from sexual orientation to bullying experiences to their parents’ employment status.

So we filed an FOI request. In the end, the data we were looking for arrived in February, as over 300 .pdf files (one per school) which slowed down our efforts to work with it, to put it mildly.

Some people, including us, have sometimes been clever and/or lucky in being able to scrape data from .pdfs, but in this case we just resorted to data entry. (I got lots of help from intern Elton Hobson.)

Today’s story, the first in a series, focuses on what the survey tells us about cyberbullying in relation to other kinds of bullying. There are lots of maps:

Data/interactives on the relaunched globalnews.ca

Patrick Cain — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:04:30 +0000

The whole globalnews.ca group of sites relaunched this morning with a responsive-design system on the front end and WordPress VIP on the back end. It went about as smoothly as these things can (fairly). Most of the last week or so was spent on making our interactive projects from the last year or so work in the new system.

Mostly they can be found on the Data Desk Investigations tag page:

Scapetoad!

Patrick Cain — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:23:13 +0000

… sounds like an Elizabethan insult (‘Thou poxy scapetoad!’) but is actually the name of a program for producing cartogram maps, maps that distort geography based on some value, like population.

It had the usual learning curve.

Our #graphicmonday feature, a story/map/interactive looking at how the College of Cardinals is out of balance with Catholic populations around the world, is our first use of it.