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Baby race: the US under-1 population mapped

Thu, 05/17/2012 - 19:34

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New figures released by the US census bureau show that most children born between July 2010 and July 2011 belonged to ethnic or racial minorities, with Hispanic families driving the demographic growth. We've mapped babies under the age of one across the US

Simon Rogers

How Bitly mapped Britain's news websites for us

Wed, 05/16/2012 - 14:29

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Which news sites are read disproportionately highly across Britain? See how Bitly mapped Britain
• Click here to explore our interactive map
• Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

Which websites do we get our news from? It really depends on where you live. In East Anglia, you love the Sun, Scousers prefer the Mail Online. In Cambridge, it's probably the Guardian, but in Leicestershire it's more likely to be the BBC.

Inspired by this great map created by Forbes' Jon Bruner showing US news site use, we wanted to show how people consume news online in the UK.

The data comes to us from Bitly. If you've shared a link on Twitter or with friends, the chances are that you've used Bitly. And Bitly, under Hilary Mason, has one of internet's strongest data science teams. They have analysed exactly how those millions of shortened links are used to show how many clicks are happening for what and where. They've given us that data for Britain for April - revealing how people read news around the web via Bitly.

You can access that data too, simply adding a "+" to any Bitly link, will show you the site stats for that story. This data is basically the next step, showing where all those clicks come from.

What does the map show?

The map - by Guardian developer Chris Cross - does not show total clicks. If it did that, it would only show those sites with the most traffic: which would mean the BBC, Daily mail or the Guardian in the UK. What Anna Smith at Bitly has done for us instead is to normalise the data. What this means is that it shows the sites and stories which are most increased compared to their average readership across the UK.

That way you get the regional variation of news coverage which shows the Scotsman and Wales Online doing well in their home turfs. But it shows also how, even in a small nation like the UK, what you read varies so much around the country - and the stories that pique users' interest. For instance, in Kent, was a Sun story which managed to get both Rihanna and Twitter in the headline; in Devon it was the BBC's photo gallery of pictures from the Pakistan air crash. These aren't necessarily the most popular stories in terms of traffic but are those identified by Bitly as having a disproportionately high interest in that area.

Anna Smith explains the Bitly methodology like this:

With a data set of millions of clicks in a single month, Bitly has the ability to uncover the most popular websites on the internet. For the Guardian, we have explored the landscape of news outlets in Great Britain. The maps look at bitly clicks made across local authorities for a selected group of dominant news sources by domain. In our analysis we looked at the number of clicks on each news source in each area and normalized them so that we can see the percentage of traffic each source has in that area. For each news source, we can see the representative amount of traffic that is given to that site over the whole UK. The most enlightening graph is where we look at the difference between each local authorities news source distribution and the overall source distribution of the UK. Here we show the source that has the largest difference between these values, thereby showing the news site that best represents that area

What do you think it shows - and do you agree?

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The Twitter news map of Britain

Wed, 05/16/2012 - 14:28

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Map: What are the most influential news sites across Britain? See how we consume our news via Bitly

Chris Cross Simon Rogers

Debt and the developing world

Wed, 05/16/2012 - 10:00

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Despite successful debt abolition campaigns, World Bank figures show external debts owed by developing countries have increased by $430bn over 12 months to $4tn

Nick Mead

A developing world of debt

Wed, 05/16/2012 - 10:00

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More than a decade after the cancellation of billions of dollars of debt, developing countries owe $4tn … and counting

Years after debt campaigners succeeded in persuading the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and G8 to abolish debts worth billions of dollars owed by developing countries, figures show total external debts are once again on the increase.

Data in the World Bank's global development finance 2012 report (pdf) shows total external debt stocks owed by developing countries increased by $437bn over 12 months to stand at $4tn at the end of 2010, the latest period for which data is available.

The global financial crisis has focused attention on the debts of the rich west. The US had gross external debts (those borrowed from foreign lenders including commercial banks, governments, individuals or international financial institutions) of $14.3tn (95% of GDP) in 2010, while those in the European Union had swelled to $13.7tn (85% of GDP) and the UK owed $9tn (400% of GDP).

But in the case of richer countries, these gross debt figures are balanced by debts owed to them by other countries.

Tim Jones, policy officer at the Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC), said: "As well as owing large debts, countries such as the US and the UK also have large debts owed to them. Most of the debt owed by and to the UK is through banks, rather than the government. Taking account of debts owed to the UK, whether to the government or private sector, external debt is around 20%. This is lower than many developing countries, as well as EU members such as Ireland and Spain."

It is not the same for the poorest countries, which do not own valuable assets overseas – although it should be noted that 40% of the total external debt stock is accounted for by the so-called Bric group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

The JDC says debt is "still a huge issue" for developing countries, which have been hit hard by the financial crisis. Exports have crashed, nationals working overseas have less money to send home, and multinational companies scale back costs and investment. The JDC estimates that the current $4tn of external debts owed by developing countries costs them more than $1.5bn a day in repayments – and $34m of that comes from the very poorest countries.

A major chunk of the debt owed by 32 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, was eliminated by the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative of the World Bank and IMF, which was reinforced by the G8's 2005 multilateral debt relief initiative (MDRI).

But many poor countries in Asia and Latin America (for example, Jamaica and El Salvador) did not have debts written off because their income per capita was too high to meet the IMF and World Bank criteria. Others, such as Bangladesh, did not qualify for cancellation because their debts were seen as sustainable.

Other problems came with the strings attached by the World Bank and IMF as a condition of debt cancellations. As economist Jeffrey Sachs said, it's "belt-tightening for people who cannot afford belts".

But even in countries that did qualify for debt write-offs, there is evidence that external debts, which fell significantly after 1995, are on the rise again.

"These loans are building up again," said Jones. "It can go unnoticed if economies are growing and exports are on the rise – but as soon as there's a crisis like a drought or flood it becomes a huge problem."

The latest African Economic Outlook report – published by the African Development Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the UN – says it is still "very difficult to assess whether African countries which have benefited from debt relief are falling into debt again". This is because the debts are too new and the full data is not available yet, but the graph above shows debts on the rise again in some of the world's poorest countries. The AEO report cautioned: "The risk remains, especially for the most fragile states."

Ethiopia's public sector debt is almost back at pre-MDRI levels, with China becoming Ethiopia's third biggest lender (11% of new loans) behind the World Bank (34.3%) and IMF (11.5%), according to the AEO report.

And there is an issue with the available external debt stocks data, says the JDC – while it tries to take account of loans from China, it is not clear how many more debts are out there, but not publicly known.

Ghana was also highlighted in the report. It used the space created by debt reductions to borrow more money on the international markets, at interest rates 10 times higher than institutions such as those imposed by the World Bank and African Development Bank.

Meanwhile, the IMF highlights 12 countries it says are at high risk of not being able to pay their debts: Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Gambia, Grenada, Haiti, Kiribati, Laos, Maldives, São Tomé and Príncipe, Tajikistan, Tonga and Yemen.

• Data from the World Bank's Global Development Finance 2012 report was used to create the 'debt and the developing world' interactive graphic. No data is available for western Sahara, Libya, Namibia, Somalia, Cuba, Burma, French Guyana and Suriname – hence the blanks on the map

Nick Mead
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Youth unemployment across the OECD: how does the UK compare?

Wed, 05/16/2012 - 07:00

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Nearly 11m young people are out of work across the OECD. How has youth unemployment changed and which countries are experiencing the worst rates?
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Youth unemployment across the OECD has risen alarmingly with nearly 11m 15-24 year olds out of work, according to latest figures.

The statistics published by the OECD, show youth unemployment reached a rate of 17.1% in March 2012, more than double the unemployment rate affecting the general population. Greece and Spain have fared worst with both reporting youth unemployment rates of over 50% of the total youth labour force. The data also shows that at least 23m young people in OECD countries are not in education, employment or training (NEETS).

Increasing youth unemployment has meant that now more than one in five young people in the labour market are out of work in France, Sweden, Poland, Ireland, Italy and the UK. The UK youth unemployment rate for March 2012 stood at 21.9% and we are increasingly catching up with Europe who have had high unemployment for a while.

The chart above shows the rates for youth unemployment for OECD countries in March 2012 and December 2007. It illustrates the rise in youth unemployment for many countries - only Germany, Israel, Turkey, Chile and Belgium recorded decreases.

Spain has had a dramatic rise from 17.4% in March 2007 to 51.1% in March 2012. Likewise Greece has increased from a youth unemployment rate of 21.6% in 2007 to 51.2% in March 2012. The chart below shows the rates for unemployment and inactivity for 15/16-24 year olds in 2011.

Turkey and Israel had high inactivity rates at over 20% but once again Spain and Greece recorded the highest unemployment rates for young people in 2011. The EU unemployment and inactivity rates for 2011 stood at 6.6%.

You can find rates for youth unemployment, inactivity and NEETs in the spreadsheet. There are also details of youth unemployment before the crisis at its peak and its latest value in OECD countries since January 2007. What can you do with this data?

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Home care, stealth tax and the elderly: which councils charge the most?

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 23:01

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A significant reduction in the number of older people getting care for free, or partly funded by the council means a vast difference in costs. Which councils charge the most and which have the lowest rate?
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The postcode lottery of social care has been exposed by a survey of local authories in England revealing big increases and wide variations in council charges for home care services that help frail and vulnerable older and disabled people, the Guardian can reveal.

Freedom of information requests to 120 councils show that home care services - which send carers to help vulnerable older and disabled people get up, washed, dressed and fed - are becoming more expensive and inaccessible to large swathes of the population.

There are wide disparities in the price people pay for care depending on where they live. Home care is free in Tower Hamlets, but it costs £21.50 per hour in Brighton and Hove. The data shows that more than 7,000 fewer older people had care fully paid for by their local authority in 2011 compared to 2009, a drop of 11%.

The Many Eyes visualisation above shows the highest hourly rates charged by councils. Click on the link below the interactive to see a full screen version.

With the government delaying its plans to tackle the country's underfunded social care system, the rising cost of home care, says Labour's Liz Kendall, is effectively a "stealth tax on the most vulnerable people in society".

The survey, given exclusively to the Guardian, shows the average charge for an hour of home care has increased by 10% in the last two years – from £12.29 to £13.61. Kendall points out that an average elderly person pays for 10 hours of home care a week and will have seen their bills rise to £7,077 a year in 2013 – up more than £680 since 2010.

With elderly voters' already smarting from the "granny tax" in March's Budget, Kendall warns that "fewer older people are getting their care for free, and more older and disabled people are being forced to pay more. These services are a lifeline for older and disabled people and crucial to help them stay living independently in their own homes."

The tables below show the highest hourly charges and the lowest including details of the party in control. What can you do with the data?

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Randeep Ramesh
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Facebook IPO: the data behind our animation

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 11:55

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Facebook is about to hit the stock exchange - valued today at anywhere between $93 and $104bn. But just how big is it and how has it grown so massive? This video by our animator Mariana Santos, shows you exactly how the Facebook became the world's biggest social network. This is the script and data behind that animation
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Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected

Mark Zuckerberg, SEC filing

Got a spare $96 billion? Facebook is about to hit the stock exchange.

That $96bn is almost three times the GDP of Kenya.

Facebook is huge. It had 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012. That's nearly three times the population of the United States.

At the end of 2004, Facebook had a million users, all in US colleges. That audience has grown 900-fold and the site is now available to anyone over 12, in almost every country, in 70 languages.

Over half of the US population is on Facebook. One in three of the two billion people online in the world are on Facebook. And those users are pretty active: they account for 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world.

Facebook's users spent an average of 8.3 hours on the network per month, per person. Or 23 minutes per day.

There are on average 3.74 degrees of separation, or steps, between any one Facebook user and another - down from 4.28 in 2008. Which - translated - means we're making more connections there.

So, how much data is that? Facebook stores more than 100 petabytes of your photos and videos. That's 100,000 times the size of the Library of Congress
Or the equivalent memory of 1.6 million top-of-the-range iPads. Stack those up and they would reach 237 miles into the sky.

All that data has raised concerns over privacy. The company records over 47 categories of data on each user. For some users, that amounts to over 1,000 pages if you printed it all out. Per person.

It uses a lot of that data to sell highly target advertising

And it makes money too

• In 2005, the company had revenues of around $50m
• In 2009, that had reached $777 million
• In 2011, they were $3.7 billion
• That's almost a fivefold increase between 2009 and 2011
• Most of that cash comes from advertising
• But a lot now also comes from games and apps
• Such as Farmville by Zynga. In fact, Zynga accounts for 15% of Facebook's revenue

Facebook admits its huge user growth has been responsible for the company's success.

So, what if it just stops growing?

In June 2009, its quarter on quarter growth was 22.8%. By February 2012, that was just 6.6%.

Facebook is not number one everywhere. In some of the world's biggest markets, the network trails behind others. In Russia, the top social network is vKontakte.

So, if Facebook's markets are becoming saturated, and most people in the West who might use Facebook already do - then, to keep growing, it will have to find millions of new users somewhere else.

Where could that possibly be?

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How Facebook became the world's biggest social network - animation

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 11:55

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How did the social network get so big - and can it possibly get any bigger?

Mariana Santos Simon Rogers Guardian Interactive team

European Union – GDP breakdown by country

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 11:39

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The eurozone escaped recession according to the latest GDP data from Eurostat – but many individual countries are suffering

Nick Mead

Statesmen and stature: how tall are our world leaders? | Datablog

Tue, 05/15/2012 - 09:20

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It seems we like our political giants to be just that – giants – according to research. So how does France's new president François Hollande compare to past leaders?
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François Hollande will step into Nicolas Sarkozy's shoes today when he is sworn in at the Elysée palace, becoming France's first socialist leader in nearly 20 years. But how does he compare to the past leaders in terms of height?

Last year we were told stature really does matter according to a scientific paper published in Social Science Quarterly.

It was an opportunity too good to pass up so we compared the heights of various leaders from different countries and eras. Now we have a new leader in the pack we're asking once again how tall really are our leaders? We've also compared them to the average height of statesmen of their country over the last 40 years.

At 5ft 7ins, Hollande is two inches taller than Sarkozy but also two inches shorter than the average height for French leaders of the past 40 years. Both David Cameron and Barack Obama beat the average height, standing tall at 6ft 1. As the first female Chancellor of Germany, it's not suprising that Angela Merkel stands 5 inches shorter than the average height for German leaders.

In the scientific paper published last year psychologists from Texas Tech University found in a study that almost two-thirds of participants showed a preference to draw larger figures when asked to draw images of leaders. An evolutionary throwback has been suggested as the root of this. Nic Fleming wrote:

It is not for nothing that top politicians are known as political giants or "big beasts". Voters see tall politicians as better suited for leadership, according to a survey of how people visualise their leaders. Psychologists believe the bias may stem from an evolved preference for physically imposing chiefs who could dominate enemies.

Cameron, Obama and Hollande have all beaten shorter candidates in past elections – Gordon Brown at 5ft 11ins, John McCain at 5ft 8ins and Sarkozy at 5ft 5ins.

The work, published by Dr Gregg Murray and J. David Schmitz, found evidence that would suggest physical stature affects people's preferences for political leadership. The paper entitled 'Caveman Politics' on evolutionary psychology relates it back to ideas and beliefs gleaned from our prehistoric ancestors.

Well, apart from Cameron, Obama and Canada's Stephen Harper who all come in at over six foot there are some current political leaders who are rather more diminutive. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is placed at somewhere around the 5ft 2ins mark.

America certainly seem to be following the rule with all but one of the US presidents in our list coming in at six foot or over. The UK have rather a mixed bag from Margaret Thatcher (5ft 5ins) and Winston Churchill (5ft 6ins) to Robert Gascoyne-Cecil who is believed to have been 6ft 4ins.

The table below shows a selection of world leaders, past and present, and their stature. Those in bold are current leaders.

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Ami Sedghi
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Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening

Mon, 05/14/2012 - 14:30

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Europe is in crisis - but what's going on? Which are the right key numbers to compare each country?
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How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare?

Well, besides the data below, Polly Curtis' Reality Check series is a good place to start, answering key questions such as What would the collapse of the euro mean for the UK? and What happens if Greece leaves the euro?

We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better. The best source for this info is Eurostat. You can download the full data below. What would you add?

1. Government debt

These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. As a whole, Europe owes €10,491,342,500,000 - or €10.49 trillion. But it's more meaningful to look at the number as a percent of gross domestic product, or GDP. So, we want to see how much that debt is as a proportion of the whole economy - kind of equivalent to measuring your mortgage compared to the whole economic value of your household. That gives us a European average of 82.5% in the fourth quarter of last year. But that figure hides a lot of variation: Greece, at the top, owes 165.3%, followed by Italy 120.1%. The UK is just above average at 85.7%. There's nothing inherently bad about having a huge debt - it depends who you owe it to and whether you can manage the payments. Bigger countries are also in a better position: essentially, if you owe the bank £50,000, you've got a problem; if you owe the bank £50,000,000, the bank's got a problem.

2. Deficits

If the gross debt is equivalent to your mortgage, the deficit is the overdraft, the running gap between your outgoings and ingoings. Big deficits mean more borrowing, and then running it up all over again to cover the costs of that borrowing.

Again, the best way to look at these is as a percentage of GDP, and Eurstat shows which countries are worst affected, this time from the end of 2011, which is the latest available data. It shows Ireland had the worst deficit then at 13.1% followed by Greece at 9.1% and Spain at 8.5%. Compare that to Germany at 1% and you can see the relative strengths of the economies.

3. Are we still in recession?

If you look at changes in GDP - these figures are from the OECD - it does show things have improved considerably since early 2009, although growth rates have hovered around zero in the last couple of years. Last month, of course, we learned that the UK has sunk into the dreaded double-dip recession.

4. Bond yields

The way governments borrow money is by selling bonds - the interest rate, or "yield", is set when the debt is auctioned. This matters because as a country the higher the rate you have to sell your bonds at, the more you'll have to pay back. In short, the lower the figure the better. As you can see from the chart below, the UK, outside the Euro, is benefiting from being a safe haven. At the other end of the spectrum, Greece and Portugal are considered less safe than Romania and Cyprus.

5. Unemployment

It might not even be part of the agenda at the summit this week, but unemployment is the indicator with the most direct impact on real people's lives of those here. Traditionally, when there's a recession, unemployment lags behind - ie, it goes up at the end of the recession and takes a while to come down again. This recession has not seen huge changes in overall unemployment yet, although the last year has seen a gradual rise.

Youth unemployment has gone up too - but the percentages are even more striking: 49.6% of 15-24-year-olds in Spain are unemployed, for instance.

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Scotland's minimum alcohol price: what effect will it have?

Mon, 05/14/2012 - 11:19

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the Scottish government is going to limit alcohol prices to a 50p per unit minimum. See the list of drinks and changes
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Scotland has set its minimum alcohol price at 50p per unit in a bid to cut deaths from alcohol abuse. It will be the first time minimum pricing has been tried in the European Union.

Severin Carrell writes today that

Recent studies published by the Scottish government said endemic alcohol abuse in some parts of Scotland led directly to the deaths of 3,000 Scots each year and cost the economy £3.5bn a year in hospital admissions and lost productivity

It's opposed by retailers and the drinks industry, who are threatening legal action.

What would be affected?

The interesting thing too is how many drinks would not be affected at all. 20 of 36 drinks on the official list are already priced above the 50p per unit limit. We've also added Buckfast fortified wine - cited in 5,000 crime reports in Scotland - which, at an average price of £7.09 per bottle, is priced at over 60p per unit as it is.

The moves come as alcohol consumption amounts have actually started to fall - although they remain higher in Scotland than in the rest of Britain.

The full data is below. What can you do with it?

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Broadband speeds across the UK: how do you compare?

Fri, 05/11/2012 - 17:47

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We asked you to tell us how fast your broadband really is. This is what happened
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How fast is your broadband? We asked you to help test your speeds and let us know how they compared to those being offered by your broadband providers.

And this is something people care about: over 3,000 of you responded within three days. So, what did you say?

Obviously there are a lot of caveats with any data collection exercise like this. It's a self-selecting sample - and people with poor access to broadband are arguably more likely to take part. The telecoms industry, too, will say that it offers "up to" a given speed as opposed to an actual speed.

However, the results are not significantly different from those discovered by Ofcom last year.

How big a problem is it?

The data we have shows that of the over 3,000 people we asked, they were offered a median average speed of up to 12mbps. We used median, because we wanted a typical speed, asopposed to a mean average which would be distorted by a few higher speeds.

And then we asked you to test the speed of your broadband using an online tester. It showed a median average speed being received of 7mbps, a gap of 42%. And there was a wide variation by company, too.

Our sample believe the government does not spend enough on promoting broadband; that it should invest more. A quarter also had no access to broadband where they lived.

These were the results:

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet, as of Friday 11 May

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Broadband Britain mapped: your web speeds

Fri, 05/11/2012 - 17:46

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We asked you to test your broadband speeds for us. This map shows the results

Simon Rogers

How are levels of credit-card fraud changing? Interactive map shows patterns across Europe

Fri, 05/11/2012 - 15:59

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Visualization

Communications specialists Catalysis have created an interactive map of changes in levels of credit card fraud across Europe

John Burn-Murdoch

Every data journalism book since 1970: interactive timeline

Fri, 05/11/2012 - 13:04

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Visualization

Dutch tech writer Henk van Ess has created this guide to data journalism in books, from 1970 to 2012. It shows how the field has changed, from 'precision reporting' to 'computer assisted reporting' to 'data journalism'. Oh and it includes our book, Facts are Sacred: the power of data (on Kindle) and the latest Data Journalism Handbook. Who is it missing?
Who made the graphic? Hank Van Ess
Where can I find it? Interactive Timeline and YouTube

• Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

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