Last week was a pretty dramatic week for UK politics. On Tuesday, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, the UK's chancellor and health secretary respectively, resigned from their cabinet posts within minutes of each other, citing the incompetency and impossibility of working with Prime Minister Boris Johnson as their motivation. Over the next couple of days, … Continue reading The Great Resignation of British Ministers
Category: Visualisations
Do Millennials have no friends?
I recently read an article claiming that 22% of Millennials say they have no friends. And then many other articles with the same figure. This made me feel sad. Some of the articles further distinguished between "close" and "best" friends, so here we're presumably talking about just any friend of any level at all. Sure, … Continue reading Do Millennials have no friends?
How to be happy: the data driven answer (part 1)
A fundamental goal for many people, explicit or otherwise, is to be maximally happy. Easily said, not always so easily done. So how might we set about raising our level of happiness? OK, at some level, we're all individuals with our own set of wishes and desires. But, at a more macro level, there are … Continue reading How to be happy: the data driven answer (part 1)
Average age at menarche by country
A question came up recently about variations in the age at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation for a female human - with regards to the environment. A comparison by country seemed like a reasonable first step in noting whether there were in fact any significant, potentially environmental, differences in this age. A quick … Continue reading Average age at menarche by country
Books I read in 2017
Long term readers (hi!) may recall my failure to achieve the target I had of reading 50 books in 2016. I had joined the 2016 Goodreads reading challenge, logged my reading activity, and hence had access to the data needed track my progress at the end of the year. It turns out that 41 books … Continue reading Books I read in 2017
The Datasaurus: a monstrous Anscombe for the 21st century
Most people trained in the ways of data visualisation will be very familiar with Anscombe's Quartet. For the uninitiated, it's a set of 4 fairly simple looking X-Y scatterplots that look like this. What's so great about those then? Well, the reason data vizzers get excited starts to become clear when you realise that the dotted grey … Continue reading The Datasaurus: a monstrous Anscombe for the 21st century
Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
Anyone who studies any amount of the history of, or the best practice for, data visualisation will almost certainly come across a handful of "classic" vizzes. These specific transformations of data-into-diagram have stuck with us through the mists of time in order to become examples that teachers, authors, conference speakers and the like repeatedly pick … Continue reading Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world
The Tableau #MakeoverMonday doesn’t need to be complicated
For a while, a couple of key members of the insatiably effervescent Tableau community, Andy Cotgreave and Andy Kriebel, have been running a "Makeover Monday" activity. Read more and get involved here - but a simplistic summary would be that they distribute a nicely processed dataset on a topic of the day that relates to someone else's existing visualisation, and all the rest … Continue reading The Tableau #MakeoverMonday doesn’t need to be complicated
The EU referendum: voting intention vs voting turnout
Next month, the UK is having a referendum on the question of whether it should remain in the European Union, or leave it. All us citizens are having the opportunity to pop down to the ballot box to register our views. And in the mean time we're subjected to a fairly horrendous mishmash of "facts" and arguments as … Continue reading The EU referendum: voting intention vs voting turnout
Unsafe abortions: visualising the “preventable pandemic”
In the past few weeks, I was appalled to read that an UK resident was given a prison sentence for the supposed "crime" of having an abortion. This happened because she lives in Northern Ireland, a country where having an abortion is in theory punishable by a life sentence in jail - unless the person in need happens … Continue reading Unsafe abortions: visualising the “preventable pandemic”
Dabbling with Data 