Yet More Tableau Data Viz
More Data Viz
Mortality Rates, Male
Oops, there may be something wrong with my data…. People are living a very long time in Russia!
Data Collection
I now have all my data, and I have an awful lot of it. This isn’t even everything I’ve got:
I’ve gathered nearly of my recent data from the World Bank website, it allows the option to download very specific pieces of data, and that function will save me a considerable amount of time. The data is already pretty clean too, which really helps. Now all I need to do is decide which data best expresses what I want to express, or see what patterns emerge.
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?Report_Name=Freshwater-usage&Id=f0dd3498#
Maps, Maps, More Maps
Using Tableau Public, I have created some visually interesting maps showing commercial water usage worldwide, links here; https://public.tableau.com/views/Industry_19/Sheet1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes
I’m sure water usage, especially excessive freshwater usage for economic reasons is contributing to environmental degradation, and I have included research in my thesis relating to this, link here; https://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/18/1027/2014/
More Maps
So it seems creating maps with the World Bank data viz tool is easy, and I really like the tool. It doesn’t mess about, and unlike many tools I have used, (Datawrapper, Tableau Public, Open Heat Maps, and more) it seems to be quite intuitive.
The maps are lovely, but it just will not let me properly download them, and only seems to allow saving within the website, which is really frustrating.
If I could download or embed these maps, then I would absolutely use this tool and all the data from this website for my final piece, because they are some of the most visually attractive I have come across. Combine that with the ease of creation and lack of need for the laborious and somewhat soul-destroying task of data cleaning, then this tool would win hands down.
Nothing is ever easy in the world of data viz. Who said robots were set to take over the world? Not yet, not yet…..
The Capitalism of Health
Here is a data journalism piece exposing the fact that massive spending on healthcare in the US does not equate to a healthy population; http://wisdemocurmudgeon.blogspot.ie/2014/06/ridiculously-expensive-us-health-care.html?m=1
“Vox: Ways the American health care system is literally the worst: The United States comes in dead last in a new, international ranking of health care systems from a top health-care non-profit. A new Commonwealth Fund report looks at how the United States stacks up against other countries on things like access to doctors and quality of care. It pulls from three separate surveys conducted over the past three years: a 2011 survey of sicker patients, a 2012 survey of doctors and a 2013 survey of adults over 18. It also uses health outcome data from the OECD and World Health Organization.”
There are some nice data visualisations in this article;
Where is the Sense?
I found this data viz online, and again, I just can’t stop thinking that it would make so much more sense to direct the (sickeningly huge amounts of) money spent on biomedical interventions (which don’t have much of an impact on health outcomes, in fact as little as 10%) towards improving living conditions and nutrition, thereby reducing the impact of disease and raising the general health of the population.
After all, it’s all about the host. A healthy body is far more efficient at dealing with disease than an unhealthy one, so why aren’t we investing in health over “healthcare”?
Link to original article here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7101/fig_tab/nature05064_F1.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Beautiful Maps
I’ve already managed to create some beautiful data visualisations as maps using the World Bank website and data viz tool. unfortunately, the site is not letting me create an account so that I can download and save these maps. I will have to keep trying. Based on experience with data viz from a previous project, creating maps this easily is not necessarily the norm, so I will stick with this tool and these data sets, as they are already “clean” and compatible with each other.
