Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Obama Campaign Spending Breakdown
Over the weekend, the New York Times looked at how the Obama campaign has been spending its cash. I appreciate the value in these sort of block charts, but, I wonder if a bar chart would not have been more clear for the comparison. I like the block charts when the designer is rearranging the data in different ways. For…
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Weekend Work
Read on…: Weekend WorkHere’s a rare weekend post to showcase some Olympic-related work. The following graphic looks at how the ranking changes for the Top-10 countries if medals are weighted. To me it is ridiculous that Kazakhstan is ranked higher than Russia because Kazakhstan has won 4 gold medals compared to Russia’s 3 when Kazakhstan has a total of 4 medals whereas Russia…
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Olympic Performance vs Economic Performance
Read on…: Olympic Performance vs Economic PerformanceThe Olympics are now fully underway and we can begin to see some patterns about who is doing well and who is, well, not. This infographic has a lot more to say about who had been doing well up through 2008. That is important because that was the last year before the fiscal/financial crisis brought about the first global recession…
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I Can’t Remember the Things I Forgot
Read on…: I Can’t Remember the Things I ForgotThe Leveson Inquiry looked into the whole British phone hacking scandal. And now that it is wrapping up, the BBC looked at what was said. As always, the great thing about inquiries is that nobody can exactly recall what happened when or who said what. And the BBC included that in their infographic.
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Drought Footprint
Read on…: Drought FootprintA lot of people’s minds may be on the Olympics that open up today in London. However, a very important story that was covered a little while ago deserves a post. The United States has been suffering from a severe drought across much of the country. Droughts are nothing new, though climate change is likely to increase their intensity in…
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Does a High Average BMI Impact a Country’s Chance at the Olympics?
Read on…: Does a High Average BMI Impact a Country’s Chance at the Olympics?It turns out not so much. A comparison of the 2008 data for average BMI (coarsely how fat a person is) for countries across their economic productivity (GDP per capita) and total medals won shows that a country’s health culture does not greatly impact said country’s Olympic chances. This is another from my work series on infographics for the Olympics.
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Washington Monument
Read on…: Washington MonumentLast summer an earthquake rattled the East Coast; I felt it while lounging on the beach at the Jersey shore when I was on holiday. But Washington got hit pretty hard. The Washington Monument lost some stones. I just lost an iced tea that spilled. But, the Monument is now going to be closed until perhaps 2014 for repairs. This…