The Lovely Charts and Graphs Thread

[C. Flower]

Gay Europe

[Spectabilis]

Very good. But what is F.H.S.O.M in Portugal and Twinkreich in France? 'Bears' I now understand thanks to some posts by Fluffy

[Baron von Biffo]

Very good. But what is F.H.S.O.M in Portugal and Twinkreich in France? 'Bears' I now understand thanks to some posts by Fluffy

In matters of this nature google is not your friend.

[Spectabilis]

Thanks, Baron. I shall resist the urge on your sage advice.

[Saoirse go Deo]

Is there a Pie Chart out there that details the amount of public service workers on low wages compared to those on high ones?

[Count Bobulescu]

Have you checked your spam box recently? Don't bother--Microsoft already knows what's in it. The company today released a cyber-security report (PDF) that took a look at, among other things, the types of spam intercepted by its email application, Microsoft Exchange, and conveniently summarized the findings in the pie chart above, as blogged by Ars Technica.
The report found that the largest portion of spam messages are, unsurprisingly, product advertisements--28 percent for pharmaceuticals (nonsexual), 3.8 percent for pharmaceuticals (sexual), and 17.2 percent for merchandise other than drugs.

That classic spam message--the one where a Nigerian prince in desperate need of money asks for a wire transfer (frauds known as "419 scams")--constitute 13.2 percent of all spam emails. And of course, email spammers are always ever-helpful in lending you a hand in the bedroom: 8.6 percent of spams are sex-related, whether it be ads for Viagara and "male enhancement" drugs (3.8 percent) or for dating sites, porn, and other sexually explicit services (4.8 percent).

Spam overall, though, is becoming less common: the number of spam messages has dropped precipitously over the past year. Microsoft Exchange blocked only 25 billion spam messages in June of this year, compared to 89.2 billion in July 2010. The reason: two of the largest spambots out there (called "Cutwail" and "Rustock") were taken down in the past 14 months. So don't expect to be hearing about foreign royalty's financial troubles as often anymore.

[Spectabilis]

Nice one Count. Thank you. My work email used to be subjected to an enormous number of spamming emails - I can picture one very sweet elderly Professor asking 'Why on earth are they sending me so many Viagra emails?' I used to wonder the same thing.

The firewall solutions seem to be much more robust now and it is extremely rare that I get unwanted emails, and they are quarantined immediately.

I have been reinforcing my own anti-whatever software this week as I have noticed some intrusions. Not entirely satisfied yet, but determined to keep the so-and-sos out.

Nice pie chart

[Count Bobulescu]

The old stereotype that men just don't get colors--it's fuchsia/sage/turquoise, not pink/green/blue!--apparently is based on an element of truth, according to a beautiful interactive of showing how people name colors on DataPointed. Stephen Von Worley used data from an XKCD color survey, where more than 5 million users were shown colors and had to type in a word or phrase to describe the color.

The bigger the dot on the interactive, the more people wrote that color. The higher up it is plotted, the more women used that name. The lower on the chart, the responses were more male. The simpler color names like red, green and blue are the large dots, and they tend to skew about 55 percent male. The top half of the chart shows the color names more women volunteered: dark moss green, buttercup, or lilac. To explore the interactive, go here to DataPointed.Net.

"While us men are busy grunting, guzzling beer, and shoving our hands down our pants, women get specific by mixing fruits, animals, spices, flowers, and other such familiarities with finely-honed modifiers like neon and dusty," Von Worley writes. "The result? A vast panoply of warm-fuzzy color names that seemingly trounces anything our Y-chromosomes have to offer."

The interactive also allows you to see the bubbles move according to saturation, brightness, popularity, and name length. All of them look pretty random according to gender except "popularity." The more popular, simple color names skewed slightly male.

[Count Bobulescu]

The standard line of thought is that movement to cities correlates with more wealth, but while that works for developing countries in Asia, it doesn't apply to Africa, as these charts from the World Bank show. Part of the World Bank's World Development Report on jobs, the chart compares the percentage of population living in urban areas with GDP per capita using data from World Development Indicators.


Urbanization usually leads to higher GDP because of higher levels of productivity, the report says, which is illustrated in the graph to the left. All five of the East Asia and Pacific countries in the graph show a steady increase in GDP per capita as people move to cities. But that did not happen for Sub-Saharan Africa; the graph on the right shows a sporadic relationship between urbanization and GDP. Part of the reason may be because much of non-farm work in Africa is from microenterprises and household businesses that do not earn much. "These businesses make a significant contribution to gross job creation and destruction," the report says, "although not necessarily to net job creation and productivity growth."

[Sam Lord]

The USA. Says it all really.

[Count Bobulescu]

WHERE DOES CARBON COME FROM?

Global emissions of carbon dioxide have doubled since 1971 but have declined since 2008, according to figures from the International Energy Agency.
The bar graph charts out carbon emissions from 1971 to the present in millions of metric tons. Emissions totalled 14,000 metric tons in 1971 and were just over 28,000 in 2009, the last year for which there are figures. That’s the bad news. The good news is that emissions dropped from 2008 to 2009 for the first time. This was probably due to the world recession but it may also indicate that measures to reduce carbon emissions are starting to have an impact. Emissions have leveled off in the United States over the last three years.

The chart is also broken down by sources. The blue portion at the bottom of the bar represents coal, the peach portion in the middle is oil and the green portion on top is natural gas. The oil portion has increased only slightly over four decades. Coal has climbed steadily and natural gas has risen sharply in the last seven years. The downturn in 2009 came from slight reductions in all of them.

[Count Bobulescu]

Writing in Mother Jones, Duncan Clark asks, "Can We Bank on Recessions to Keep Global Warming in Check?" The answer seems to be "no."
The line graph tracks the growth of GDP among 150 nations from 1960 to 2008, as compiled by Richard York of the University of Oregon, using figures from the World Bank. The blue line represents GDP, the red line is carbon emissions.
The two do track each other closely, but carbon dioxide grows at a slightly higher rate. The pattern discovered by York is that carbon emissions rise an average of 0.7 percent for every 1 percent of growth in per capita GDP but fall only 0.43 percent for the same 1 decline. So overall, there is a constant gain in carbon emissions above economic growth. The pattern is particularly visible with the financial meltdown of 2008 (the latest figure available). GDP plummeted by 3.5 percent but carbon emissions continued to grow at 3 percent. Earlier, they had advanced as much as 6 and 7 percent per year, a rate of growth never achieved by GDP.

[Count Bobulescu]

In 1900, communicating was simple. You could talk to somebody. You could write a letter. You could read ink, printed on paper. That was it, really. If you owned a telephone, you were the 1%.

In 1950, four in ten households owned a telephone or radio. Otherwise, the instruments of making and consuming information hadn't much changed. Talking to people and reading pages made up almost all of the rest of the typical family's communications diet. If you owned a television, you were the 9%.


In 2012, we've lived through a Cambrian explosion of communications technology. If you want to make or consume information, you can do it on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on Foursquare, in texts, on mobile phones, on land-line phones, on VOIP phones, on TV, on iPads, with head phones, with speakers, on the radio, in print, in the mail, and -- especially in the case of a Gchat and Twitter black out -- you are still permitted to speak into a real-live human's face, directly.


The graph at the top of this post, from a McKinsey Global Institute paper on social networks, is a 110-year history of talking, watching, reading, and writing. It's a fun graph to sort of gaze into and take in, but here are three things I found particularly interesting:


(1) In the late 1970s, Americans spent as much time watching TV and listening to radio (6 hours) as they did talking to people and reading in 1900. That's pretty remarkable as a statement of TV and radio's ability to capture and sustain attention.


(2) The graph has a harder time showing simultaneous communications consumption. When I watch TV, I'm often on my phone. When I'm listening to the radio, sometimes I'm also IMing. As more communications tools developed that engaged only one of our senses, or (like TV, and unlike reading) that required a very low level of attention, it allowed for easy simultaneous use of communications tech.


(3) It's interesting how new technologies expand the amount of time we spend communicating rather than replace each other within a finite band of talking/watching/reading/writing. The adoption of the land-line phone, for example doesn't seem to have replaced in-person conversation. It simply added about 2 hours to the typical person's communications diet. Moving from farms (where 40% of workers were employed in 1900) to factories and then finally to cubicles has dramatically expanded the time we can spend (indeed, must spend) keeping in touch with people and information.

[Count Bobulescu]

Click top link for questions.........bottom chart for answers.


http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/...ire-countries/


http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/...b/interactive/

[Count Bobulescu]

Ouch for Ireland

America has suffered through a housing crisis for the past several years, with the average price falling 30 percent, and much more than that in some areas. So it may come as a surprise to many Americans that much of the world still appears to be in the throes of its own housing bubble. The chart below, from the Global Housing Monitor produced by the International Monetary Fund's Prakash Loungani, offers some perspective.
Housing prices have been falling in about half of the countries, but they're rising on the other half.