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A Miscellanea of Interesting Links


Human Development in Colour

Sometimes you can trawl twitter for days and find nothing more than the odd gif of a large cucumber surprising a cat.  Other times, you can stumble across the most wonderful data visualisation.  This website visualizing the Human Development Index (HDI) was introduced to me by @PopGeog.  Though it is, of course, rather reductive to summarise the development of a country in a single figure, I’ve always been a fan of the HDI.  In the sense that it’s pretty simple to understand and certainly represents development on some level, the HDI isn’t a bad index.  These visualisations illustrate the individual components of HDI (life expectancy, education and income), as well as offering a geographical overview of where low HDI is most prevalent.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, most people living in a country with low HDI also live in Africa. 

People in Prison

Continuing on the theme of comparing all the countries of the world, I stumbled across data on the prison population, while reading this blog.  While there are no visualisation, there are lots of lists, which I’m also a fan of.  I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many of you that the largest prison population in the world is in the USA, where 2.2 million people are inside.  China also has an impressive 1.7 million.  However, if you look at the prison population rate, then the Seychelles fairs worst (though the USA still comes second).  Meanwhile, over 92% of prisoners in the UAE are actually foreigners, and Monaco tops the list for proportion of female detainees.

The World Online

Within our own University, the Oxford Internet Institute has redrawn a map of the world so that the size of countries is represented by the total number of internet users there.  They’ve also shaded countries depending on the percentage of people within that country who are online.  In this new world map Africa shrinks dramatically, while Japan and South Korea swell dramatically. 

Population Atlas of Nepal

While Nepal might not be the largest country in South Asia (and barely anyone there has internet access), it actually has a rather wonderful website dedicated to mapping its 2011 Population Census data.  You can look at maps of everything from the mean age at first marriage, through literacy and education to sanitation and employment.  This site is an example of what low- and middle- income countries can achieve in terms of data sharing.  In fact, in many ways, I prefer this site to the UK census site.

 

About the Author:

Dr Melanie Channon (nee Frost) is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing working on the Collen Programme. Melanie is a trained demographer and social statistician, and her primary areas of research interest are the drivers of fertility transition in developing countries, son preference, and gender statistics.   She has expertise in the demography of both Asia and Africa, with a focus on Nepal and South Asia.


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