The Rio Olympics, the first on the South American continent, ended after a total of 972 medals were handed out in 306 events. Approximately 11500 athletes competed in 28 sports for a total of 306 gold, 307 silver and 359 bronze medals. The following cartogram series sums up the most successful of all participating countries by resizing each country according to the number of medals going to athletes from there:
Wine Worlds
Wine is produced commercially in more than 70 countries, three of which account for almost half of the world’s production: France, Italy and Spain. What else does a closer look at the world of wine tell us?
The geography of wine – the product obtained exclusively from the total or partial fermentation of fresh grapes – can be viewed both from the perspective of producers or consumers. Continue reading
Meat Eaters
Rio 2016: Participants and All-Time Medals
Rio 2016, this year’s Summer Olympic Games are about to start. Following the suspension of a large number of Athletes from the Russian team, 11239 athletes are participating in the event, competing for 306 sets of medals. The following map gives an overview of where participants at this year’s event are from, still proving the overall picture of previous games with the wealthy parts of the world dominating the picture, but this year also with a larger number of athletes from South America and especially from Brazil as the host nation. Brazil as the host nations did not have to go through all qualifying rounds and received automatic entry in some disciplines. Also shown in this image is the all-time medal count from all modern Summer Olympics (1896 to 2012) as proportional circles on top of each country:
EU Referendum Statistics
“Sanity is not statistical.” The political rhetoric in the aftermath of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom has brought us closer to Orwell’s infamous state of Airstrip One then one could have possibly envisaged. Each side of the debate twists and turns the statistics and ‘facts’ to keep supporting their argument, while neither political party has yet managed to end the political stalemate in the country, which finds itself in a state of ‘post-truth democracy‘ that it slowly entered during the pre-referendum campaigns. All sides claim what can be best explained with the German word ‘Deutungshoheit’ (a form of prerogative of interpreting the numbers behind the result as the ultimate truth). The real truth perhaps is that there is no truth, and the deeper you delve into the results, the more complexity you find. So here are some more less-talked about findings that emerge when taking a second look at the EU referendum statistics.
As mentioned in my earlier piece on mapping the referendum outcome, of all those who were allowed to vote in this referendum, 13 million people did decide not to cast their vote, which – despite the higher than currently usual turnout – is a significant number that could have made a difference in the close outcome either way. Amongst those that voted the immediate picture that emerged from the polls published after the referendum was confusing. Several polls, such as those paid for by Lord Ashcroft and used for this analysis, agreed that the older people were those who were more likely to vote for Leave, while the youngest had the largest share voting for Remain. However, when taking the total electorate into account, and considering those who – according to SkyData – chose not to vote (or spoilt their ballot), this picture became far less clear than it first seemed:
The EU Referendum
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The decision has been made: 17,410,742 people of the United Kingdom’s 65 million population voted for leaving the European Union. These are about 26.8% of the UK’s resident population, or 37.4% of the electorate in this EU referendum. It also equals 51.9% of the valid votes cast, as stated in the official figures from the electoral commission. Continue reading