iPads on eBay



sales of iPad 2s abroad
sales of iPad 2s abroad





sales of the iPad abroad
sales of iPads abroad




Counting People


census map feature
census map feature




Further below the first map is a second map.

Census map 2
Census map 2


Radiation…Tastes Like Metallic Tang

It is a mad, mad world out there these days and I suppose this is the point at which we all begin to run around shouting that the sky is falling. Despite all the madness in Libya, the constitutional referendum  in Egypt, the protests in Syria, the election in Haiti, and the president’s overseas trip to Brazil we still have the aftermath of the Sendai earthquake and the subsequent Pacific tsunami. The latter being particularly important because of the damage to the now infamous Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station in northeastern Japan.

Fukushima will likely be up there with the three other major nuclear disasters of a power station variety: the Windscale Fire in Cumbria, England; Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and of course, Chernobyl in the Ukraine (then the Soviet Union). We sometimes have heard the media compare Fukushima as the next great nuclear disaster, but how bad has it really been?

This graphic by XKCD comes to me via my coworker, Brian Morgan, and it breaks down our average exposure to ionising radiation—the bad stuff—from nuclear accidents from Chernobyl to Fukushima to x-ray machines to the natural radioactivity in the soil. Yes, you are likely being irradiated as you read this post.

A cropping of a radiation dose chart
A cropping of a radiation dose chart

Radiation is bad. But we will all find better solutions to problems if we keep our fears both in proportion and in check. Fukushima is not good. But it is far, far from the end of the world.

Growing Pains

An information graphic looking at obesity in the United States
An information graphic looking at obesity in the United States

This piece comes from my coworker, Ben, who found the graphic in Scientific American. Broadly speaking the piece is looking at the obese and the overweight in the United States, comparing the numbers of both children and adults in 1980 to 2008. These numbers are supplemented by the risk of death posed to both men and women from a few different causes. (I know at least diabetes is linked to weight, but as to whether the others are linked I am unaware.)

I have a few quibbles with the piece; for in general I think educating the public about the health risks of obesity a worthy endeavour. From a more scientific-ish point of view, as I recall, BMI (body mass index) is not a particularly useful tool in determining obesity because it fails to differentiate people who are heavy with fat from those who are heavy with muscles. A strong and regular weight-lifter is not necessarily overweight, but simply has a lot of muscles. Does that make the weight-lifter less healthy than those with lots of body fat? Methinks not.

From the data side, I am curious to know why only the two years? It may very well be that they are the only two years for which relevant data exists. But I doubt that. 1980 compared to 2008 is interesting, but perhaps already well-known. What would perhaps be more interesting is whether over the past few years, the increasing attention paid to weight and other health issues has begun to affect the growth of the obesity problem—poor pun very much intended.

The accompanying text makes a point about the number of adult Americans being obese. Certainly the dots as a percentage of the population achieve that goal of showing percents—though I hasten to add that their arrangement around the body in the centre does very little to aid in comparing the adults of 1980 to 2000 let alone the children. And as to the children, the article points out that they are growing fastest. At this, however, I can only take the authors at their word for the graphic does nothing to visualise this statement. Perhaps they outgrew the adults—but then the adults were themselves at one point children, but that is another matter—but their growth could now be slowing as a recent turn of events. But since we only have two years, we cannot know for certain.

The risk of death by [type of death] is interesting. But running bar charts as more of a radial chart could become a bit confusing. Is there any reason the bars grow in width as they extend further out? Or was that part of an all-too-obvious play on the problem. After all, the growth in area could be significant; a simple line of constant stroke to a point along the radial distance markers would have sufficed. And then I would be particularly curious to know whether any of these types of death are related to obesity. Neither the article nor the graphic provide any clues besides whatever knowledge the viewer brings to the table. (Okay, I think I am done with the puns.) And if one happens across the article with almost no knowledge of what diseases or medical conditions are caused by obesity, how does the graphic tie into the cost of healthcare costs brought upon the country by obesity.

Overall, I think the graphic is well-intentioned. The public is becoming more accustomed to seeing data visualised. However, we need to make certain that we are communicating clearly by making datapoints easier to compare. (Looking at things across half of a circle is a bit tricky.) And then we need to make certain that the data we are visualising supports our statements. (Are children really the fastest growing? Over what span of time?) And then take the time to explain to the audience those things that may not be common knowledge. Does that mean dumb a piece down to the lowest common denominator of someone who has absolutely no knowledge? No. Design needs to elevate and educate its audience. Perhaps some of the finer details remain unexplained because of sheer complexity, but when amidst a host of details well-understood, that confounding bit may push an unsure viewer to do some additional research and educate him- or herself about the subject matter. And that, surely, is not a bad thing.

Won’t You Be My Neighbour


Social Networking Usage
Social Networking Usage

Poor MySpace.

The Name’s Bond…

The Washington Post has released an in-depth article, or series of articles, about the intelligence community of the United States and its growth since 11 September 2001. There are several visualisations of data and relationships between government agencies and companies along with a video introduction and, well, a traditional written article or two.

A Screenshot of an Interactive Piece of the Article
A Screenshot of an Interactive Piece of the Article

Overall, the piece is quite interesting to look through—although I have not yet had the time to do just that. Some of the visualisations appear a bit thin. But, that may be just because I have not yet had time to play with them enough to draw out any particular insights.

What is nice, however, is again having visualisations supporting editorial content in such a fashion.

British Politics





BBC Sample
BBC Sample





Guardian Sample
Guardian Sample



Three Views of One Constituency
Three Views of One Constituency



The Sun Example
The Sun Example




The Times Example
The Times Example




Fire Nancy Pelosi?

Sunday night, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that you may not have heard about. The bill goes towards addressing universal healthcare coverage for US citizens. As I said, you may not have heard of it…

The bill was passed largely along partisan lines with about 30 conservative Democrats joining the conservative Republicans in voting against the legislation. This morning, the GOP unveiled a new website called Fire Nancy Pelosi that seeks to capitalise on the anger against—and perhaps even hatred for—providing healthcare to all Americans by collecting donations to capture 40 House seats in the forthcoming mid-term election. The website uses a map of the United States to show “who wants to fire Nancy Pelosi most”. According to the map, states are ranked by donation totals.


Without attempting to talk about the politics, the problem with the map is that it is attempting to equate the state’s supposed anger against Speaker Pelosi and healthcare for Americans with the sum of donations per state. As of the time when I captured my screen, the interesting visual is that many traditional red states are blue and purple, e.g. West Virginia and North Dakota, whereas many traditional blue states are purple and red, e.g.California and Illinois. The problem however, is that one state may be able to provide more donations than another.

The most obvious difference is in terms of population. Without access to the data I cannot state facts about exact donation totals. However, the map does break down the states into deciles and so I have quickly pulled from Wikipedia some rankings on population (from 2009) and income per capita (from 2000). What is quite clear is that the states donating the least are among the states with the smallest population. Six of the Bottom 10 donating states are from the ten smallest states. Conversely, eight of the GOP’s Top 10 Donating States are among the ten largest states in the country by population.


If you compare income per capita, I find the message a bit more confusing, but still quite interesting. I do not claim to be a statistician and an analytic review of the numbers is a bit outside my area of expertise. However, for the Top 10, not a single state is ranked 40 or below in terms of income. And only one state is ranked in the 30s. One Top 10 Donating State is also found in the top ten by income per capita and a total of five of the Top 10 Donating States are in the top twenty by income per capita. Among the Bottom 10 Donating States we also find five states from the top twenty states by income per capita. However, we also find four of the last twenty states by income.

What strikes me is that the Top 10 Donating States have a larger population base from which to draw donations and, loosely, earn more per capita and thus, perhaps presumptuously, have more disposable income for contributions. The Bottom 10 Donating States have among the smallest populations and while some are seemingly quite wealthy, a significant number are among the least well-off in terms of income per capita.

And none of this critique discusses how the Top 10 Donating States use a bright and vivid red to draw attention whereas the Bottom 10 use a fairly dark and almost dull blue to push forward the bright red.

Visualising the Olympics

























Looking at the Haitian Earthquake


screenshot of BBC article








diagrammatic explanation of radius vs. area






