Ofcom's media nations report: Bar chart epic fail

As a designer of interactive visualisations you have great power and great responsibility to stop the user from doing stupid things. Whoever put Ofcom's media nations report together on Power BI, left the option to the user to tick plotting the responses to multiple questions, with the percentages going well above 100%. I'm not familiar enough with Power BI to know if this is the fault of the software rather than the designer.

And the magic setting producing the magic plot (one of the questions only has answers for 2018-2019

Real time train passenger analytics

Last week while sitting in a train I noticed that the displays show train loading infographics about the passengers per carriage. Coming out of London there were a couple of full carriages.

Once we made the first stop, enough passengers got off to tilt the picture from half full to definitely half empty.

A green electoral trend

The bar chart below, from Green party leaflets, is very interesting. The argument here is that the share of their vote is growing and voting for them is not a lost vote. I have a lot of sympathy for the argument for proportional representation. The 2015 British national election was a joke, with UKIP being a third party in votes but not in seats, and SNP benefiting massively from first past the post to get a monopoly of Scottish seats that is not quite reflected in the vote counts. 

However, this chart poses a few questions for me. Sure, the green vote grew from 2010 to 2015, but was it a one off that cannot be projected into further growth for 2017? 

After all 2015 was the fall of the LibDems, and those voters who felt betrayed by Clegg but hadn't forgiven Labour either could vote Green. The situation of course is very different now, with Labour breaking away entirely from the Blairite past while the LibDems are trying to capitalise on the 48% Remain vote (by repeating the Guardian quote 'Corbyn betrayed us' among other things).
An equally interesting feature of this bar chart is the plateau from 2005 to 2010, which supports the argument that 2015 was an outlier and not the manifestation of an underlying trend. Last decade had very different priorities to the current one; the two big parties had largely taken on-board environmental concerns, the Tories even had a green tree as a logo (the same one that was repainted with the union jack recently), and even though the economic crisis was obvious at the end of the decade, the political priorities took a while to change. So maybe 2010 is the outlier, and the trend is there.
We'll only know once the 2017 results are out!

The Tory deficit

So, another month, another election campaign. Cambridge is a two horse race again, this time there is no dispute on which parties are the two horses, as in the little snippet I scanned from the latest LibDem leaflet. But what about that black arrow over the blue bar? That's what I call 'the Tory deficit'. Not the financial deficit but the one of votes. Or is it?

Let's think about this. The black arrow would bring the Cons up to about 34%. Then the total would be 34+35+36=105% and that's without counting the small parties. I'm also not convinced the bars start from zero, but it's quite hard to compare the length of the arrow against the length of the bars. 

In terms of electoral rhetoric, 'Jeremy Corybn's (sic) candidate' is an interesting choice. Julian Huppert very much lost in 2015 because he was 'Nick Clegg's candidate'. Of course the Liberals are pushing the argument a bit too much by saying (in a previous leaflet that went to recycling without stopping by the scanner) 'Don't vote Tory, you might get Corbyn! 

  

It's the economy, stupid!

So I was listening to my BBC local station yesterday. Have you noticed how rather mediocre radio stations make a bit of an extra effort in their weekend programming? Normally this involves some specialist music shows, but BBC Cambridgeshire also has the Naked Scientists . One of the themes of the evening was language, and one of the featured scientists (hopefully not naked) was the economist Keith Chen. The fact he is not a linguistics professor is a crucial thing to note, as well as the fact that he teaches in the school of management and not in the economics department. But I digress.

Keith Chen's main point was that people speaking a language that has an explicit future tense (such as English or Greek) don't save as much money, don't take as much care of their health etc. compared to speakers of languages that don't have a future tense (aparently German is such a language). For the nuanced argument you can read the relevant paper which I have only skimmed through but hey, this is a blog, we don't take ourselves too seriously.

One of his main sources of data is the world values survey. The first thing I notice on visiting their site is the beautiful magic quadrant visualisation known as the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map, or occasionally the Welzel-Inglehart Cultural Map. This immediately screams 'Samuel Huntington Clash of civilisations' to me, but I haven't read that book either so I won't get carried away. Just notice how countries are bundled together in mysterious ways: Azerbaijan occasionally becomes orthodox, Israel and Greece catholic, the English speakers are of course exceptionally neither protestant nor catholic even though they could be either or neither, and the colouring does or doesn't always follow the religion, or the cluster, which contorts around accordingly.

So this wonderful source of data proves that future tense equipped languages like the ones mentioned above have speakers that don't plan for the future, and vice versa. The examples quoted included of course the UK and Greece as the worst savers in Europe. This tempted me to use the website facilities to get the table embedded below: 

	TOTAL	Country Code
		Cyprus	Germany
Save money	42.8%	13.9%	57.0%
Just get by	38.4%	66.3%	24.7%
Spent some savings and borrowed money	9.1%	12.2%	7.6%
Spent savings and borrowed money	6.6%	5.8%	7.1%
DE,SE:Inapplicable ; RU:Inappropriate response; BH: Missing; HT: Dropped out survey	0.2%	-	0.3%
No answer	1.7%	-	2.6%
Don´t know	1.1%	1.9%	0.8%
(N)	(3,046)	(1,000)	(2,046)

To me this data says one thing: People in Germany were well off at the time of the survey, and people in Cyprus were much less well off. When you have money to spare, you save, when you don't you get by, and that has little to do with your language and the way it expresses future events. It has a lot more to do with employment going up or down, banks doing well or being about to collapse, and the euro being too strong or too weak in relation to the country's economic health. In fact Chen went as far as citing Belgium, as an example of where everything else being the same, language is the only factor differentiating people. Perhaps he should check out some call record analysis proving that Belgium is really two parallel societies that meet in Brussels!

I was planning to finish on a note about the sad state of linguistic research but it would be wrong, actually the fact he is in the management school explains the unique blend of positivist prejudice displayed here.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is a two horse race

In the wider context of the cult of the leader/CTO, Cambridgeshire and the Peterborough unitary authority are bundled together for a devolved mayor election, with a budget for the mayor to tackle housing and transport. To her credit, the green candidate at least proposes forming an assembly to keep this leader in check, but there is little chance of a green mayor. Local election literature told us time and again that it's a two horse race. But which two horses?

Labour have been using the only previous result that covers the same geographical area with a similar electoral process, and helpfully, shows them as the only ones that can beat the tory. They also foolishly put it on their website in jpeg format, with discrete cosine transform artifacts and all. Next time please use png guys!
But the mayor would have important make or break powers on a number of important issues. Houses in Cambridge are about as overpriced as in London. A new train station has led to redevelopment and price hikes in formerly affordable Chesterton as developers prepare to house even more London commuters. Peterborough of course has been discussed in the national press in a number of 'this is why Brexit happened' articles. This election is likely to be taken far more seriously by voters than the police and crime commissioner one in 2016.
On the other hand, Lib Dems are doing something even worse, using the Cambridgeshire county council results that wouldn't include any Peterborough votes at all. After all they still have residual support in Cambridge from back in the day when they were the anti-war, anti-fees party to the left of New Labour, whereas in Peterborough the Tories are much stronger, and they are a distant third party.

For more close monitoring of election visualisations, see Phil Rodgers' blog  .

The girl with the dragon infographic

I still haven't read 'The girl with the dragon tattoo'. I have read another book that wouldn't have been published without the Millennium trilogy's success, the biography of the author: Stieg, from activist to author. Stieg Larsson was a fascinating character, in some ways personifying the whole generation that came of age in the late sixties and early seventies.
He grew up in the north of Sweden, liked drawing and shortwave listening, and as a teenager became an activist against the Vietnam war. He did his military service after finishing school, some odd jobs, and spent a short stint in Eritrea training female guerrillas on mortars and getting very ill. Not quite the guerrilla techniques this blog is supposed to focus on, I hear you say.
So here's the twist: having returned to Sweden he moved to the capital, Stockholm and ended up with a temporary job for the press agency TT. Let's get the rest of the story from Jan-Erik Petersson's biography, in Tom Geddes' translation:

 'At TT Stieg began by writing up sports results and the like until, standing in for a colleague, he had a chance to display his talent for illustrating articles with diagrams, boxes, and other devices, and this led to the offer of a permanent position. He was to stay with TT for twenty years. 

Stieg Larsson had not studied journalism and had not been taken on as a reporter. He had created his own corner - news graphics - where he was something of a pioneer at TT. [...]Stieg dealt mainly with urgent jobs for news cables. If an aeroplane had crashed in Guadeloupe, he would draw a map of the area with the crash site marked in.

He worked on his own, producing maps, graphics and diagrams in the form of boxes and circles with his special tools - fine-nibbed pens, transfer letters, a caption machine, a scalpel. It was a real craft, at least until the late 1980s when Adobe introduced its Illustrator program.

Sounds like the heroic age of mapping and data visualisation! Though as a Tableau warrior you can carve a similar niche in your organisation as the go-to person, especially for maps, if everyone else is using less capable tools. If you spend some effort to learn QGIS,even better! Stieg also put his skills in the service of the causes he believed in:

[in] the early 1980s, he was still active in the Socialist party and had begun writing for its weekly magazine Internationalen. He submitted articles on national service for women, on the New Age movement and superstition; he drew a map of US and Soviet military bases and nuclear weapons facilities throughout the world.   

You can get an anthology of Larsson's non fiction, The Expo files  (with a Tariq Ali introduction, here's the Guardian review and the Telegraph review), but as the title suggests, it is focused on his writing for Expo, investigating neonazis. It does feature a piece on New Age from Internationalen, though unfortunately not the map of nuclear weapons facilities. Perhaps the next tribute publication after the Expo files and the autobiography could be a 'best of' his news graphics?