Fair Warning: Elitism, the US Census crisis, and map pedantry
Morning!
On the home front
Oxbridge is ‘more elitist than we thought’. MP David Lammy unearthed the data that shows that 4/5 of students at the prestigious universities had parents with professional or managerial jobs, and there were “more offers made to Home Counties pupils than the whole of northern England”:
In news that will surprise precisely zero women, YouGov found that half of women aged 18 to 24 have been sexually harassed in a public place. Nearly six in ten said that someone had made sexual remarks to them that made them feel uncomfortable.
BuzzFeed found that there’s a suspected 13,000-strong botnet which helped push the pro-Brexit agenda on Twitter in the run-up to the EU referendum. The revelation comes as the US is still grappling with Russian interference in last year’s election, and amid new questions about potential interference in the Brexit vote.
Over the pond
Is Washington bungling the Census? The 2017 Economic Census is delayed, and the data collection system is near breaking point, thanks to a lack of funding. Really interesting piece about why statistics and data is vital for a country.
WaPo has a nice explainer on what a single-payer health system looks like and how it works. Having grown up with the NHS as standard, I forget too often how alien a concept this is to many Americans.
The Californian wildfire is one of the most destructive wildfires in that area in a long time. The NYT has produced a great graphic showing how it spread, hour by hour.
Odds and ends
This is an incredibly boring one but Adobe has written about how research by the ODI shows there is a role for PDFs in open data. Uh-uh. I feel unreasonably annoyed about this because every bone in my body says PDFs are antithetical to what open data should be, and makes for really bad UX. We’ll see.
Facebook seems to be completely messing around with the algorithm, annoying news organisations which rely on it for traffic. It looks like a total nightmare. This is what FB interactions look like for the 60 biggest media companies in Slovakia (source):
Last week I showed you sorting algorithms visualised by colours, now see them in err, folk dance form! That’s quick sort in Hungarian folk dance, but there’s also merge sort, bubble sort, select sort, and one that I quite like, insert sort which is shown using Romanian folk dance.
Ever wondered about the language of hip-hop? There’s an awesome data visualisation essay at The Pudding. This essay inspired a Tableau version of a similar explorer tool about indie music.
I have seen this FT Uber game before but I totally forgot to play it. It has a really nice look and feel to it, although it is (to me) out of character with the rest of the FT. I really enjoyed the 10/15 minutes it takes, and I think it does a great job of demonstrating the difficulties of balancing working life in the ‘gig economy’.
WaPo produced this piece about the rise and fall of IS in Syria and Iraq. I like this image:
Maps, maps, maps
It’s been a while since I had enough map links to justify having a separate section, and I’ve missed it! I may have fallen in love with this beautiful old map of the Berlin subway which shows passenger numbers by width (from Twitter):
I stumbled across a blog about Tolkien’s LOTR map and why it’s geographically bad. There are a couple there but my favourite is the one about how the Anduin is really inaccurate. Let’s just say I learned a lot about the geography of LOTR *and* about how rivers work.
The world has gotten a lot smaller in a century, if you look at isochronic maps. There’s not many places you can’t get to within 36 hours:
That’s all for this week, thank you for reading! If you like this newsletter, please forward it to people, encourage friends to subscribe to it, or buy me a coffee to show your appreciation. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.
