Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Follow the Money. And Enjoy a Donut on the Way. Or a Pie.
Visualising government budgets is always fun. Until you realise that you are seeing where your money is going. But now we look at Australia’s expenditures. And as I pay nothing in taxes to Australia, I get to keep my fun. This piece is doing some interesting things within the framework of the donut chart I generally dislike. We do get…
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God Save the Queen
Read on…: God Save the QueenFor the Queen’s Jubilee I had been looking for a good infographic or two about how the United Kingdom had changed over the length of her reign, at least thus far. Alas, I found not a great deal of substantial work. This is an infographic from the Guardian that looks at quite a few single figures. But it also has…
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A Nine-story Log Cabin
Read on…: A Nine-story Log CabinIt’s like a log cabin. But taller. A lot taller. The New York Times reports with an infographic on a nine-story block of flats (apartment building for us Americans) in London called the Graphite Apartments that was built almost entirely of timber. Credit for the piece goes to Mika Gröndahl.
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The Education Gap
Read on…: The Education GapLast week, the New York Times looked at the growing education gap amongst this country’s largest metropolitan areas. The infographic, click the image below to go to the full version, is perhaps a bit more layered, nuanced, and complex than it looks at first. In about forty years, the number of adults with college degrees has doubled, good, but so…
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Cracking Down on Unemployment Benefit Fraud (in Canada)
Read on…: Cracking Down on Unemployment Benefit Fraud (in Canada)Nobody likes people cheating the unemployment system for benefits. Especially Canadians apparently. So this is a proposal to encourage the unemployed to start working. Credit for the piece goes to Steve Murray.
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Oh(lder) Canada
Read on…: Oh(lder) CanadaCanada is getting old. At least so the Canadian census data says. As a percentage of the population, the map made by the National Post below looks at where the old people are. Within reason, one would expect to perhaps see a more even distribution across all of Canada. However, it appears that the northern territories and provinces have fewer…
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New York Times Lies About Science
Read on…: New York Times Lies About ScienceIn a rare infographic misstep, the New York Times published an incorrect diagram detailing the centre of the Earth. Clearly, anyone who knows anything about science knows that it is not a solid core of iron at the centre of the Earth, but dinosaurs. And I see no dinosaurs in this diagram. Credit for the piece goes to Jonathan Corum,…
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Economic Development in Africa
Read on…: Economic Development in AfricaThis falls under the just-because-it’s-about-geographies-doesn’t-mean-it-should-necessarily-be-visualised-as-a-map category. The Guardian has taken data from the African Economic Outlook, specifically real GDP growth rates, and charted them as a map. This caught my interest initially because of some work I have been doing that required me to read a report on African economic development in coming years. So I figured this could be…