Not “the Ukraine” as it is (admittedly) fun to do in pop-culture references to Seinfeld. This comes from the Washington Post and the article tries to show that the protests in Kiev are not necessarily a vast majority against the government. Certainly the opposition is strong, but there is also a very strong pro-government movement. Why? Because in the broadest of senses, Ukraine is where the West, i.e. the European Union, meets the East, i.e. Russia.
A divided Ukraine
Credit for putting this all together goes to Max Fisher. Credit for each of the original graphics is to their respective designers whom I cannot identify.
As the Winter Olympics continue, the Economist looks at a different kind of race. The race between companies reaching a certain amount of revenue—along with the net profit from said revenue. How long does it take a company to reach $1 million in revenue? When all companies have reached the same amount of revenue, what percentage is net profit? It’s a neat little interactive. Thankfully you can skip the race and get straight to the results, a nice design feature.
Race to $1 million
Credit for the piece goes to R.J., G.S. and K.N.C.
Last week the New York Times published a nice interactive about the minimum wage and just how difficult it is to live on it. (We will for now spare the charts that show how the actual purchasing power has declined over the years.) First you pick your state because not every state pays the same minimum wage. Then as you begin to enter figures for your expenses, or a hypothetical person as in this screenshot, you find how quickly a minimum wage earner runs out of money. And then how much debt they owe and how much more they have to work to pay it off.
This piece from the Washington Post examines the idea of economic mobility. That is, what is the likelihood that children born and raised in an impoverished family will surpass their parents’ standard of living.
Economic mobility
Credit for the piece goes to Darla Cameron and Ted Mellnik.
As I noted in my Friday post, I spent last week in Lithuania for work. That same Friday night, I had a conversation with a few coworkers over dinner and a beer about credit cards. They teased me that for all of America’s technological advances and advantages, even in Lithuania they were using more secure forms of bank card payment: chipped cards. And that story seems a perfect segue into today’s post from the Washington Post.
Through a combination of charts, maps, and illustrations—a cropping of which is shown below—the Post details the advantages of using microchipped cards in preventing certain types of fraud. Additionally, because of the integration of the visuals with the written explanations, text can be used to provide longer anecdotes to explain exceptions and outliers when and where necessary.
Today’s post looks at education across a set of 65 countries from a standardised test backed by the OECD, basically a group of wealthy countries. The test results found that some poor countries have surprisingly good education systems whereas some of the world’s wealthiest countries—here’s looking at you, United States—perform poorly. The Huffington Post created this graphic to plot the data.
Education scores
I really enjoy this piece. It plots each income decile’s results, blocks the countries into OECD members versus their partners, and then each country’s average socioeconomic status is shown as being above or below the OECD average. This is the type of piece I see as a static image that I would want to see made interactively—though I fully understand how difficult and time-consuming that can be—so that I could begin to filter and re-arrange the data. Could discoveries be made by organising countries by geographic regions? Could one just look at the top or bottom deciles?
The South China Morning Post had a fantastic infographic detailing the hunting of elephants for their ivory. Despite bans to make such hunting illegal, the problem continues and is worsening because of the Asian trade in ivory.
Yesterday the BBC published an article about the success of the United Kingdom’s creative industry especially given the not-so-successful economy of the last few years. Unfortunately, the article included the tree map below.
A not so necessary tree map
The problems are a few. First, a tree map is usually looking at two variables. One is encoded through the size of the block and the other often its colour. Here, colour means nothing. So you are instead looking at only the size of the blocks. Basically, the same type of information that would be clearer to differentiate if this were a bar chart.
Second, a tree map has a hierarchy of placement. In other words, even if you cannot tell how much larger one block is from another—we all know we are not so great at comparing areas—you know which block is larger than the other by their arrangement in the map. Here we see no such hierarchy. The smallest block follows the largest block, which itself follows three other blocks.
Now that arrangement would be acceptable if the tree map were nested. That is to say if the different industries were grouped within like industries. Because then you would order those nested blocks. But that is also something not happening here.
All in all, this would have been a lot more effective of a chart if it had simply been made into a bar chart.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
I’ve been away for over two weeks on holiday. So to spread good cheer to all, today I am sharing an image from a series of maps the BBC put together to try and explain the civil war in South Sudan.
Ethnic groups and tribes of South Sudan
Credit for the piece goes to BBC graphics department.
Today’s piece is straightforward, but I felt very good at detailing its story. The Wall Street Journal mapped out the path cotton takes on its way from the fields to the denim in your jeans.
Cotton’s path to market
Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
