What happens if you lock two creative people and three geographers in a pub, pour some statistics about their city over them and let their mind work out the rest? You could find out the result at this year’s Festival of the Mind of the University of Sheffield that went on for 10 days throughout Sheffield. Nick Bax and Daniel Fleetwood of Humanstudio were the two creative minds that teamed up with Carl Lee of Sheffield College and Danny Dorling & myself from the University of Sheffield to take a look at the impact of higher education on the city in a slightly unusual way. The result of this collaboration is the short film ‘A City in Context‘ viewed during the festival and now available online. Continue reading
Tag Archives: statistics
Medals vs Athletes
Almost everything has been said and shown about the Olympics by now – not just in the maps on this website, but virtually everywhere. The Guardian did extensive juggling of Olympic data resulting in alternative ways of looking at medal counts, and so did many others (such as the excellent graphics team of the New York Times). One last thing from here though…
What was quite interesting to see while working out the statistics for the cartograms featured on this website was the perhaps obvious correlation between the size of a national team and the number of medals that it received. That is of course a correlation that one would expect:
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$54 Trillion Debt
Soaring debts and plummeting stocks – the financial state of world hasn’t changed a lot in the last years. With debt levels continuing to rise, and economic activity stagnating, the impact appears to lead to yet another financial crisis (isn’t it the same crisis that we are in for three years now?). The following cartogram shows the countries of the world resized to their total public debt in 2011 as estimated by the IMF (data taken from the World Economic Outlook 2011, with additional data from EUROSTAT and other IMF publications). To put the total values into perspective, the countries are coloured by the public debt to GDP ratio (see below for a worldmapper-coloured version of the same map). The small reference map shows the estimated GDP output in 2011, allowing a comparison of global distribution of public debt and the distribution of economic activity:
