Examining How We Measure Our Lives

Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation

  • It’s Friday. So what else could you want but cat videos?! On the internet?! But seriously, that’s what I have for you today. But with a twist. The BBC and the Royal Veterinary College collaborated to document a day in the life of cats by attaching collars with micro-cameras and GPS trackers to several felines in one English village. Cats…

    Read on…: Secret Life of the Cat

  • Hong Kong—and to a similar extent Macau—is part of China, but at times not so much. Because of the long history of British control through their colony, the people of Hong Kong, Hongkongers, are accustomed to a more liberal, democratic, and perhaps Western lifestyle than those of mainland China. Since the British handover, a local university has been asking the…

    Read on…: Hong Kong and Hongkonger Identity

  • Corporate taxes are always a fun discussion point. Who pays too much? Too little? Not at all? In May, the New York Times published an interactive piece examining US companies and their effective tax rates from 2007 through 2012. At its core, the piece is a bubble chart along one axis that plots the tax rate for the company, with…

    Read on…: Corporate Taxes

  • Today’s piece comes to me from my colleague Eileen. The Harvard Business Review published a report commissioned by Steelcase that looked at how different cultures prefer different office layouts, based upon different attitudes and traits exhibited by the people of different countries. That lead to three different types of spatial layouts. But what is really nice is that the piece…

    Read on…: Office Space(s)

  • I am travelling abroad for two weeks. While I have a number of posts lined up, I doubt that I will be able to respond to anybody or post current and/or topical pieces. But at least you will have something. So to kick things off, this piece from the New York Times makes good use of a table. It simply…

    Read on…: Leaving on a Jet Aeroplane

  • Edward Snowden is still on the run; he is still in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport without a passport to enter Russia. But if ever succeeds in extricating himself from his current predicament, Snowden presumably will seek to land in a country without an extradition treaty with the United States. So in this interactive piece, the Guardian explores…

    Read on…: Extraditing Snowden

  • Line charts can be a great way of looking at the impact of event over a metric over a set period of time. But what happens when you want to look at multiple metrics over that same period of time? In this example from the New York Times, we have a series of line charts examining the impact of Federal…

    Read on…: Federal Reserve Actions

  • Earlier this year the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended changes in the current blood alcohol limits to reduce youth drunk driving. The NTSB wants the limit dropped/increased from 0.08 to 0.05. Fun side note, technically, the NTSB needs to have the states enact this on their own accord because such limits are not federal power. Instead, the federal government…

    Read on…: Alcohol-related Traffic Fatalities

  • The National Post published this fascinating infographic on the Canadian fur industry. Historically speaking, that industry is one of the most important to Canada being one of the primary reasons for Canada’s colonisation by France and later the United Kingdom (to a lesser extent). The graphic provides illustrations of the pelts to scale along with data on the volume and…

    Read on…: Canadian Fur

  • The United Kingdom is one of eight, probably nine nuclear powers. (Israel has never confirmed that it has tested/operates nuclear weapons.) Unlike most countries, the UK only uses one delivery system to operate its weapons: submarines using Trident ballistic missiles. The British Trident system became an issue in the coalition government. While it was supported by both the previous Labour…

    Read on…: British Trident System