The riots of August 2011 took the nation by surprise. Consternation followed as events appeared to spiral out of control, then condemnation. Later reflection, and the compilation of hundreds of statistics on the rioters who were convicted. Much was also written about those who were not caught but were interviewed, as well as on the severity of the sentences handed down to the minority of rioters who were caught, or identified and convicted. Prison sentences totalling more than 1,800 years were handed down with an average custodial sentence of nearly 17 months (more than four times the average term handed down by magistrates courts for similar offences).
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Tag Archives: cartogram
Visualization of Satellite Data Availability
The currency of geodata is an important factor for many advanced geospatial applications. Examples for this are security questions in the control of international borders and coastal areas, or up-to-date information following natural hazards. Here a near real time availability of geoinformation is of high value. A wide range of commercial satellites providing near real time information are available. Satellites with active sensors, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems, can deliver such information even at night and in areas with cloud coverage.
The German SAR satellite mission with the TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites provides coverage of every location on earth within 1-3 days. The acquired data can be made available for processing within hours or in certain cases even minutes. Continue reading
World Cup Statistics
Where is all the football gone? While it’s another four years now to wait for the next Football (Soccer) World Cup, there is plenty of statistics to look back at from this year’s tournament in Brazil. “World” cup of course only applied to a small number of countries from around the world, as only 32 nations have qualified for the event. And then, one after another leaves early, so that the number of matches adds to the representation of countries and regions from around the world in this global sports event that – in terms of television ratings – is only superseded by the Olympics. Here is how the world looks distorted according to the total number of matches played at the 2014 World Cup:
And there is much more data that is counted during the event. The following map series looks into some of the statistics showing the distribution of goals, cards, fouls, tackles and much more of the action that went on during the four weeks in Brazil: Continue reading
Europe in Brazil
Much has been said about Europe’s low performance at this year’s Football (Soccer) World Cup in Brazil. Defending champion Spain and also Italy went out in the first round of the tournament. However, with not only Germany and the Netherlands, but also Belgium, France, Greece and Switzerland six teams from Europe made it into the knockout stage. Two of them are still left in the semi-finals. Overall on an global level this looks much less unsuccessful than it sounded in some of the media – only some of the balances have changed within the continent compared to the previous tournament. While waiting for the semi-finals, we now looked at how the European teams performed so far. Here is the new shape of European football as it looks prior to the semi-finals (with Germany and the Netherlands still having the chance to become even bigger in these four maps):
World Cup Bites
On the first match-free day of this year’s Football (Soccer) World Cup in Brazil, one incident dominates the headlines while all fans anticipate the knock-out stage. It’s Luis Suárez and his bite into his opponent Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder that keep making the headlines. Here comes the cartographic perspective on the topic: We made all efforts to analyse all available data on this year’s bite incidents (so far) at the World Cup and ended up with the following map representation of this highly complex data set. The map makes this data immediately accessible to the lay-person showing from which country players have been biting their opponents and which countries are the most affected by bite attacks of other teams. The evidence is hardly deniable – there is a highly unequal distribution emerging in these maps:
Displaced lifes: Escaping conflict, violence and disaster
“Every minute eight people leave everything behind to escape war, persecution or terror.” This is the background to the UN General Assembly’s decision to declare June, 20th as World Refugee Day. As the UN estimates, about “43.3 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to conflict and persecution” by the end of 2011. This includes several groups of people, categorised in refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless persons and returnees. The following two maps put a spotlight on the geographic distribution of two of these groups. The first map visualises data on displaced people from a recent report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). The organisation estimates figures on people who are internally displaced “caused by conflict, generalised violence, human rights violations and natural hazard-induced disasters”. The cartogram shows the countries of the world resized according to the total number of internally displaced people there, adding up to 33.3 million according to IDMC’s report:
