What do Iceland, Finland, Cyprus, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, France, Malta, Belgium, Hungary, Australia, Slovakia, New Zealand, Estonia, United Kingdom, and Luxembourg have in common? They all have lower rates of "relative child poverty" than Canada, according to a UNICEF report card a "Measuring child poverty in the world’s rich countries." Some 13.3 percent of Canadian children live in relative poverty, defined as households whose disposable income, adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the national median income. We're in 24th place. Iceland is first, at 4.7 percent.  The US ranks 34th, at...

22 October, 2012

Tense video of mission control scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, California, as they receive word of the Curiosity rover's descent and landing on the surface of Mars, interspersed with a beautiful animated simulation of the landing. [Video link] And here is the first color photo Curiosity transmitted after landing, showing the landscape to the north of the rover: The image, which shows the north wall and rim of Gale Crater, has been tilted to level the horizon. It's blurry because the camera that took it still bears a transparent lens cap that is covered with dust kicked up during landing....

07 August, 2012

When information is presented in a format computer programs can read, as opposed to a static, telephone directory-style list, fresh insights spring from the data. Contrarian friend Gus Reed prepared a compendium of revelations arising from Elections Nova Scotia's annual political donations report—once we liberated it from the cloistered format favored by the former Chief Electoral Officer. Some examples: Does Nova Scotia have a party of the rich? Not according to the donations made in 2010. When Gus plotted the proportion of donations against their size, all three major parties showed a remarkably similar distributions: Vote tallies for the three major parties in...

22 June, 2012

In a series of posts last September, Contrarian revealed that Nova Scotia's Chief Electoral Officer had degraded the format used to report political donations over $50. For the first time, she released the file as a scanned PDF that cannot be searched or readily copied to other formats. Helpful Contrarian readers promptly hacked* McCulloch's degraded files, enabling us to republish the data in the searchable, text-grab-friendly format used in previous years’ reports. Today's long overdue follow-up provides the data in two new, even more useful and interesting formats: An Excel spreadsheet readers can view, parse, and re-use in ways limited only by their imaginations and...

21 June, 2012

Oceans2012, a coalition lobbying to ensure that the 2012 reform of the European Union Common Fisheries Policy "stops overfishing, ends destructive fishing practices and delivers fair and equitable use of healthy fish stocks," has produced a slick video to back up its campaign: [video link] Some factoids: Typically, shrimp trawlers throw 80 to 90 percent of the marine creatures caught back overboard. This means that for one kilo of shrimp, up to nine kilos of other marine wildlife is caught and wasted...

06 June, 2012

Brendan Chilcutt has created the Museum of Endangered Sounds, where you can revisit technological sounds of yesteryear: PacMan, a dot matrix printer, a dial telephone, and a 56K modem connecting over a phone line. It was that last example that caught the fancy of Atlantic Technology columnist Alexis Madrigal: Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part...

06 June, 2012

NYU grad student Josh Begley wrote a simple program (technically, a processing script) to capture a Google Earth arial image of every prison in the United States, then used the images as tiles to build a huge mosaic he calls Prison Map. The complete image is so vast, and takes so long to load as a website, Begley's main site defaults to a 700-prison subset of the best images. The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and...

06 June, 2012

Locate your twitter contacts on an interactive world map with this simple mashup. Let your cursor hover over the bottom right corner of the map (not the one above, which is just a screenshot, but the interactive map linked to here) and a Twitter Account sign-in dialog will open. H/T: Nathan Yau...

23 February, 2012

Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,  veterans' benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans' benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years. This screenshot doesn't do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original. An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle...

12 February, 2012
[Update below.] Software designer Nick Barry used the mathematics of probability to calculate the optimal darts strategy for players of varying skills, and turned the results in a series of infographics: The critical issue is: Which part of the board should players of varying skills aim for?
Should they aim for the triple 20, with a big payout on a success, but a low score from a miss? Or, should they aim for the bullseye? Alternatively, is there some other optimal location on the board they can aim for that, whilst not the highest scoring region, has a large expanse of middle-of-the-road point values. Would aiming for this region, even with an inaccurate shot, get a reasonable number of points such that, on average, the expected score is the highest that can be achieved? The true answer to this riddle, as we will see, is that "it depends…"
17 January, 2012
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