The upcoming annual World Malaria Day on the 25th of April is one of the most visible international activities to tackle the problem of a disease that today is mainly a problem on the African continent. Beyond that day, activists from public sector as well as from many private organisations have regular meetings to find solutions for a disease that UNICEF describes as both preventable and curable. Continue reading
Tag Archives: africa
Two Sudans
The human shape of the planet is constantly changing, so that the map of the world needs to be drawn every once in a while. On this 9th of July we are witnessing the birth of a new nation, with the south of Sudan officially becoming independent from its northern (now) neighbour. The following gridded population cartogram shows the population distribution within and between these two nations, giving every person living in the region the same amount of space. For the much smaller population in the south it will be hard work ahead in building a new nation, and for statisticians it will be similar hard work to improve on the population data that went into the creation of this map, as the pattern shows how crude the information about the population distribution in some parts of the two countries is – however, it still gives a good indication of where people living in the two new Sudans that are now on the world map:
A Picture of Open Access
The Open Access Week is promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It goes into its 5th year in 2011. The community claims that
Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.
Following up the Open Access Africa 2010 conference in Nairobi/Kenya Rania Baleela and Pablo de Castro Martín have created a presentation the global development of Open Access (and draw a special focus on the situation in African countries). They used a number of worldmapper maps to make their case. In addition I created a new map for them that shows the number of activities by country along the SPARC-organised 4th edition of the Open Access Week (Oct 18-24th, 2010). This is the newly created map on the OA 2010 activities (the full presentation can be accessed online in the e-archive of the University of Madrid, Pablo has also written a brief report about OA Africa at the BioMed Central Blog):
South Africa: A people’s view
The ball is rolling, and the football world looks at South Africa and the South African people, who keep the world entertained with the unique Vuvuzela sounds. There are an estimated 49,320,000 living in the country, with an area of 1 221 037 square km this makes a population density of 41/km2. But the population is far from being equally distributed across the country. The following special worldcup edition of worldmapper’s gridded population cartograms shows where people are really living, and in which dimension the cities strike out in the population distribution. For easy orientation, all worldcup host cities are labelled. In addition elevation information is added to the map, so that one can see how many people live at which elevations.
Click here for a larger viewThis map has been created by the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield). We welcome the use of our maps under Creative Commons terms; please contact us for further details – we also appreciate a notification if you used our maps elsewhere. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.