Uncategorized – Page 14

What’s In a Name?

Gadhafi is dead. Sorry, I meant Kadhafi. Again, apologies, Qadaffy.

For so many years we have tried to spell the now deceased dictators name. It’s been in Saturday Night Live (sadly I cannot find a clip online). It’s been in the West Wing. So how can it be done?

The problem is that his name is in Arabic, which uses a different alphabet and so for the English-speaking world, transliterators must assign Latin alphabet characters to try and replicate the sounds in his name, some of which are unique to Arabic. Ever notice how the holy text of Islam is spelled often Koran or Quran? Just take that same problem and extend it further into a guy’s name.

This graphic, from Wikipedia, shows how the different parts of his name can be transliterated. And very quickly one can see why nobody really knows how to spell the name.

The next graphic is from Breaking Copy and depicts the most common ways of spelling the man’s name. The design of the piece is certainly more about entertainment than conveying a learning. But, it goes to illustrate the variance by major respected news organisations, all of whom are reporting on the man’s death. Credit for the piece goes to Daryl Lang.

Breaking Copy's infographic on the issue

And as a retrospective, news of his death and the liberation of Libya made me think back to my own graphic about some of the very first airstrikes in post from back in March.

Detailing the Libyan Crisis as of 20 March

But, anyway, he’s dead now. So the question is what name does he use on his headstone…

The Northeast Passage

The Northeast Passage was supposed to be a shortcut to Asia from Europe through an open waterway in North America. Many tried to find the route. They failed. Because we have a mountain range running from the northernmost part of North America to the Isthmus of Darien where, perhaps desperate for the route, we dug the Panama Canal.

Climate change, however, is shrinking the Arctic ice cap and making the northern shores of Canada, Russia, the US and a few others navigable. True, the best times for travel are in summer. True, there are still icebergs the further from the coast you go. But you can now travel the Northeast Passage, sailing north from Japan, skirting the Russian coast and then down the North Sea into the commercial ports of northern Europe.

The New York Times has a piece about the improving business opportunities for those daring enough to ply the route. Accompanying the article is this map, a cropping of which appears below.

Show Me the Money

Campaign finance is always an interesting subject during election cycles. I believe I have heard that once a congressman wins election he needs to raise $1000 per week to stand a chance of re-election in two years’ time. One need only imagine the difference in scale for presidential contests.

Or do you…

The New York Times created an interactive piece that details the financing, principally of this year’s primary campaigns, but alongside data from four years ago. Inflation hasn’t been too terrible, so the numbers are relatively comparable.

Of some note, however, is that this time around this is not an ‘open’ election. In 2008 the sitting president was term-limited and his vice president was not running so both the Republicans and Democrats were open contests for any challenger to win. In 2012, President Obama will not (likely) have to fight other Democrats for the nomination of his party and his funding can be marshalled solely against his Republican challengers. Whereas the Republican challengers need to spend considerable amounts of their funding simply to get through the primaries.

What’s In a Tweet?

Tweeting in 140 characters would seem to give one little information, aside from interesting ways of shortening and truncating the English language. However, if you dig just a little deeper than the blurb of text, one can find a whole lot more information that companies—surprise—find valuable.

This graphic, originally by Raffi Krikorian at Twitter, is via the Economist as part of the Daily Chart blog. Certainly the topic is interesting and the diagram useful, but it could probably a bit more structure and clarity in terms of arranging the information. But, if one takes the time to read through it, the breakdown of a single Tweet is quite fascinating.

The Secret Message Within the FedEx Logo

For the logo designers, via xkcd:

Subliminal

Surveying Sentiment

How do you feel about the economy?

The New York Times has posted an interesting interactive visualisation detailing the sentiment expressed by participants—defaulting to the most recent 100—answering several questions on the state of the economy. As a survey, this is—and it is framed as such—an unscientific sampling of trending opinions of only those who feel inclined to comment and are registered members of the New York Times.

What makes this more interesting is the ability to demographically filter the responses to find, for example, that the unemployed feel worse about their job status than the employed…perhaps that is not the best of examples, but, hey, it works.

One can also find the specific response tied to a marker on the field/band/spectrum of responses by mousing over and then clicking on the symbol. A little and unfortunate quirk here is that clicking on the person forces one down the page to the specific comment, but then leaves one with no easy way of returning to the broader picture short of scrolling all the way back to the top.

Less Pie for Fewer Less Fortunate Foreigners

Foreign aid is the ‘soft’ power of a country vis-a-vis the ‘hard’ power of military force. Think blankets with ‘from the USA’ during earthquake relief in Kashmir instead of Abrams tanks in Kandahar. Some also goes to building infrastructure and increasing the standard of living for those in emerging countries. If you boost the income, you boost the buying power and thus boost the total possible market size.

This chart, which supports this article, from the New York Times is simple but effective. Not only does it show the decreasing amount spent in terms of absolute dollars, but also as part of the overall budget. After all, one can, in theory receive a smaller (by angle) slice of pie, but if the size of the pie increases, you net more pie. And who doesn’t want more pie?

Although this is the Republican-led House of Representatives, so the pie is being made much smaller. So…

Interestingly, in Britain, where the right/centre-right Conservatives are in power (with the liberal Liberal Democrats), the government of David Cameron is also cutting spending. But there, areas like defence spending are falling under the axe. One of only two, if I recall correctly, areas not being cut is foreign aid spending. (The other is healthcare.) Furthermore, if I recall, Britain, despite its austerity drive, is actually increasing spending on foreign aid. Maybe the Brits just will have new markets for all that British engineering…

The Greek Tragedy

The Euro…yeah, that pesky bugger and all of the complications it is causing for the European Union at the moment. In July, the BBC released this animation explaining the Greek debt crisis. It’s worth a check, though some of the graphics could use improvement…like the one using scaled buildings in a bar chart.

10 year interest rates compared, from the animation

Critically for US readers, who have to put up with all this talk about how we cannot run a deficit, pay close attention to the bit about lenders. Deficits are not expensive until interest rates go up. And they only go up when lenders fear the inability of a government to repay its loans.

Glaciers Aren’t So Slow After All…

Antarctica is a continent way down at the southern end of the world. It is covered almost entirely by glaciers. But glaciers move, and NASA and the University of California unveiled a map looking at the speed of the glaciers’ movements. Along with it, an interesting little video showing the tributaries to the glacial flow.

from the BBC.

Back in the USSR

So, those of you a little bit older than me—not to date myself—probably remember the evil Reds of Soviet Russia. Some my age do as well. Younger than me, it’s probably all ancient history. And so for those of you who forget, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, if I am to simplify, a Russian empire that featured a centralised, command and control economy and a dictatorial government. In 1991, the empire fell apart for a number of reasons and became 15 independent countries, Russia still being the largest. And a lot has happened in the twenty years between 1991 and 2011.

Twenty years being a long time, the BBC has remembered the event by creating a relatively simple piece that compares the fates of the various countries in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s breakup. One takes one drop-down list and selects a country and then another country from the other list. And in the centre one can control whether the comparison is of wealth (GDP), health (life expectancy), or leadership (no. of times the presidency has changed hands).

I have an issue with some of the metrics and whether they are the best suited to describe the wealth, health, and democracy of the former Soviet republics. But, I think the strength really is not so much the charts but the brief summaries for each country that try to capture the story of the past two decades.