Thursday 30 June 2011

Does Anyone Look at This Blog?

When I started this blog I wasn't really sure if anyone would ever look at it but as it turns out people somehow find it and some lost souls even return more than once! Even more surprisingly (for me) is that people often get in touch with me because of it, which is really good because I like to make contact with like-minded researchers and share ideas in this way. Google Analytics allows you to keep track of the number of visitors and the country of origin so I thought I'd highlight the usefulness of that and also post some charts of the visits to my blog...

Here's a chart showing visits per day since I started blogging (as usual, click images to enlarge)


This is a Google Analytics map showing visits per country (still work to do in Africa!)


Most blog visits in the USA come from California


The point of this post is threefold. 1 - to highlight the magical properties of Google Analytics. It really is brilliant. 2 - to demonstrate that blogging does help connect like-minded people and make collaboration possible. 3 - to write about something other than deprivation!

P.S. There will be more on deprivation in the near future...

Friday 17 June 2011

Commuting Animation for 2001

The results of the 2011 Census will not be released for a while yet and in the case of migration and commuting data it usually takes about two or three years before we get our hands on it. I've recently been looking at commuting patterns at district level in the UK from the 2001 data in anticipation of studying changes when the 2011 data are released and have put together this short animation. You can play the animation and also use the slider on the time line to control the speed yourself... (it may take a moment or two to load)

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

I've just selected 18 different districts from across the UK and looked at the range of commuting origins. A couple of points to note here. I've only included flows over ten in order to cut out some of the 'noise' associated with very low flow numbers. Also, for Belfast, the commuting data is split into Belfast North, South, East and West so that one looks a little different.

A few points of note. City of London and Westminster have the highest inflows in the UK, at over 300,000 and 400,000 respectively. I've chosen a sample of places just to give reasonable geographical coverage. What I aim to look at in the relatively near future is commuting and deprivation together, but this is a slow-burner...

Here's the image file for City of London, just as an example. Click the image to see it in full size.


Thursday 16 June 2011

World Prison Populations

I was going to post something else on deprivation, and I will do again soon, but today it's time for something completely different. For one reason or another I've been thinking about prison populations in different countries in the world. Maybe it's because I've been watching Banged up Abroad on National Geographic! Anyway, I got interested in it and started looking at the data and publications on the International Centre for Prison Studies website. It's all very interesting and at times alarming but thanks to the people at ICPS we have a reasonably good idea about all this. The 8th Edition of the World Prison Population List puts the total prison population at about 9.8 million in 2008 - roughly the same as the total population of Sweden! A couple of quick 'top ten' charts now...




The United States, China and Russia account for almost half the total world prison population. The US total in 2008 was 2.3 million, which is more than the entire population of Latvia and more than half the total population of Ireland. The prison population is more than the city population of Houston and not far off the city population of Chicago. The United States also has the highest rate of imprisonment per 1,000 persons, as you can see below...



In 2008, the rate of imprisonment in the US was 7.6 per 1,000. Russia was next at 6.3 and then Rwanda at 6.0. European nations generally have a much lower rate, with the United Kingdom at 1.5, France at 1.0 and Sweden at 0.7.

You can play around with the numbers to discover lots of interesting facts. If the UK had the same imprisonment rate as the US then instead of having a prison population of 90,000 or so, it would have a prison population of 465,000. On the other hand, if the US had the same rate as the UK, they would have 458,000 prisoners and not 2.3 million. Food for thought...

Given the topic, I'll end this rather random post with this...

Wednesday 1 June 2011

IMD 2004, 2007, 2010 - Change Over Time...

This is the last deprivation-related post in a while. I promise. I've been experimenting with English IMD data from 2004, 2007 and 2010 and have finally found a moment to do to it what I did to the Scottish IMD data, where it is all online and clicking an area produces a chart showing change in rank through time. In this new example, I've also added in the change in rank between 2004 and 2010, as you can see below. The rank change doesn't tell you if an area became more deprived in absolute terms, only that it is less or more deprived in relation to the other 32,481 LSOAs in England.


You can see in the example above a case of a quite large change in rank. This is for an LSOA in London. The maps are quite basic because I don't have time right now to build a more sophisticated site but the colour scheme is based on quintiles, with red most deprived, yellow next and blues less deprived (the darker the blue, the less deprived), as below.


For the moment, I don't have any plans to extend this analysis to Wales or Northern Ireland, but you never know...