From the Herald
New Zealand has the highest rate of obesity in Australasia, according to a new global analysis.
The “Australasia” group has two countries in it. The proportion overweight or obese differs between those two countries by 3.3 percentage points.
There’s a good interactive visualisation from the IHME group who put the data together.
Two colour wheels, one using red-green-blue colour coordinates based on how monitors work, the other using a rescaled coordinate system based approximately on what the eye sees
The second set of colours isn’t as dramatic, but they are much better at being evenly spaced around the circle and equally bright.
Following up on the “net tax” tangle, Keith Ng has a step by step explanation of how income tax and income distribution has changed over recent years in NZ.
You can also play with the visualisation yourself. Or, if you want to see the arguments about it, they’ll be on his Public Address post.
Maps are good because they take advantage of all the previous maps we’ve seen to provide background familiarity. On the other hand, they use up both the available spatial dimensions before you’ve actually got any data, so you need to encode the information some other way. Colour is the obvious choice, but colour is much more limited than people appreciate.
Kieran Healy tweeted “It’s not like there’s a simple, tradeoff-free solution, but this is not a good map.”
And he’s right; it isn’t. There are too many categories, and some of them are ordered but not all of them, so colour isn’t enough. Even if you’re going to try, these aren’t the right colours: for example, orange should be between yellow and red. About the most you could do clearly with a single map is the three-way split: Yes, same-sex couples can just roll up to the registry; No, not this week; or It’s Complicated.
Jacob Harris pointed to an article at Source, describing the design of graphics for a story about marijuana legalisation. It does much better
They link to the classic piece “When maps shouldn’t be maps” by Matthew Ericson, which I’ve linked before. They also have a whole collection of articles on better maps, though it’s fairly programming-oriented.
A new map to let you see the impact of rises in sea levels on your area: this is Auckland with 13m sea rise
This doesn’t show the impact of storm surges, which are the big problem for a lot of eastern coastal Auckland (though not so much for Manukau Harbour).
(via everyone on twitter)
We’ve seen animated pictures of mass transit routes before, but mta.me has the wonderful touch of lines that behave like plucked guitar strings when they cross. Not all that useful, but pretty and soothing. And a reminder that New York has a whole lot of trains, just like we don’t. By Alexander Chen
(via @_inundata)
Yes, it’s a simple swap of two numbers, but if anyone actually read the thing…
(via @WINDY_BUTT)
Keith Ng has his annual interactive graphic of budget changes up at Public Address, and will soon have a graphic showing how overall forecasts have changed over time.
[update] And Harkanwal Singh has his version up at the Herald
Two new(ish) interactive visualisations
Attention conservation notice: I have to write this post because I’ve spent too much time on it otherwise. You don’t have to read it.
There was an episode of “Yes, Prime Minister” where the term “Human Resource Rich Countries” was being posed as a replacement for “Less Developed Countries”, meaning “poor”. “Resources” is a word that can mean lots of different things, which is why I spent more time than was strictly sensible investigating the following graph
The graph appeared in my Twitter feed last Monday. It’s originally from a campaign to give Australia a school funding model a bit more like NZ’s decile system, as recommended by a national review panel, so it is disturbing to see New Zealand almost at the bottom of the world.