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Archive: graphs

The history of Scotland’s population

17 January 2008 21:28

Categories: Current affairs, General, Scotland, University

I recently had to write an essay for university about changes in Scotland’s population since 1945. While I was writing that I happened, almost by chance, upon The Registrar General’s Annual Review of Demographic Trends 2004.

What’s so special about 2004? It was the 150^th anniversary of civil registration (which began in 1855, in case your arithmetic isn’t too hot). So the Registrar General took the opportunity to delve into the statistics and produce lots of interesting analysis on this historical trends of Scotland’s population as far back as records go.

While I should have been writing my essay, I found myself perusing the graphs. I’m that sort of person. Obsessed with graphs. I’ll share a few of the most interesting ones with you.

Sorry about the illegibility of some of these. I have to confess that I am stealing the Registrar General’s bandwidth (although this does not vex me because the public is paying for that bandwidth, and something tells me they won’t get me with the goatse treatment). The original images are huge (much bigger than they appear on the PDF), so I have had to crudely reduce them in size to fit in these pages.

Immigration

Immigrants flooding this country! Er, or not.

Literacy

The Registrar General used the number of people signing by mark while marrying as a crude measure of literacy up until 1915.

Marriages in Gretna

They are a much more modern phenomenon than you might imagine.

Divorce

I bet if you got divorced in the nineteenth century it was national news.

Death

My favourite topic! You can see the general long-term decline in the number of deaths. But more interestingly, the peaks a troughs become much less extreme, signifying improved medicinal technology and ability to cope with epidemics.

These are just a few of my favourites, but I could have included twice as many (to be honest, you’re lucky I didn’t). But if you’re interested in Scotland’s modern history and demography I’d definitely take a look at the full document.

3 comments

Seeing what I hear

19 September 2007 17:16

Categories: Entertainment, General, Internet, Music, Personal, Technology

I am a big fan of the music discovery and social networking site Last.fm. I am also a lover of beautiful pointless graphs. So LastGraph was always going to be a winner for me.

The existence of LastGraph makes me so happy. Like Andrew Godwin, who wrote LastGraph, I read this webpage a while ago and thought to myself, “I want.” But I thought it was a bit of a long shot to expect anyone to provide such a service.

Obviously I was wrong! What’s more, there are plenty of different options to choose from, so once you’ve made one graph you can make another and look at it differently.

Unfortunately, it only goes back as far as the beginning of 2005, so the early part of my Last.fm history. But what remains is fascinating to look at. The snapshot I have posted above is from May–July 2007. For some reason I always get more nostalgic about music that I listened to during summer, so I’m pretty sure that looking back I will get a little bit misty-eyed about Justice, Simian Mobile Disco and Can (incidentally, they were all albums that I bought on my last trip to the pre-HMV Fopp).

If, for some reason, you are interested in seeing the entire graph, it is available to download here. But be warned — the PDF is quite a large file!

The colours represent how early I first listened to a band. Reds and oranges were the first bands I listened to; purples are the most recent and greens are in the middle. Glancing at my graph, it is clear how much more eclectic my listening habits are. As time goes on there are fewer large patches, and the reds have been squeezed out by a larger variety of colours.

Surprisingly, it is completely impossible to follow any band all the way through my graph. I think this is down to the fact that I tend to just put iTunes in shuffle mode and let it select albums itself. I suspect the same bands would crop up week after week if I tended to choose for myself.

Even so, I am amazed that I can only pick out Battles three times on my graph. I have been flat-out obsessed with them for over a year (and particularly since the release of Mirrored), but seemingly I have not listened to them as much as I had thought.

My theory is that when I am out and about (and therefore not scrobbling), I choose what album to listen to more often, so this is where I have listened to Battles the most. (I think this happened to Polar Bear as well, who I listened to a lot, but are nowhere to be seen on my Last.fm profile.)

Funnily, I can see plenty of patches where I listened to Eels a lot. I never understood why Eels appear so high up on my Last.fm profile (not just overall, but for the past 12 months as well). I’m not sure the graph has aided my understanding of this, but I have clearly listened to Eels a lot more often than I thought.

I just got an iPod, so I will be able to scrobble while I’m out and about as well. I predict an increase in both the amount of music and large patches appearing on the graph. I hope LastGraph sticks around because it will be really interesting to create more of these graphs to compare over time.

H/T lots of people including Plasticbag and Somefool.

1 comment

Chris Lightfoot

6 March 2007 21:32

Categories: Blogging, Current affairs, Internet, Politics, Technology

I am not qualified to talk about Chris Lightfoot. I have never come close to even meeting him, and I only know of him through his blog and his work on certain mySociety projects and the like. But the news of his unexpected death has made me quite sad.

As MatGB notes, if you have never heard of Chris Lightfoot, you will probably at least have used a website that he helped build. For instance, the Downing Street e-petitions website which has been making the news recently. Or WriteToThem. Or PledgeBank.

Whenever I read anything that Chris Lightfoot wrote, he always came across as incredibly clever. I didn’t always agree with him. For instance, I didn’t take his rants about Chip and Pin seriously, particularly as he acknowledged that Chip and Pin is more secure than old fashioned signatures.

However, I recognise now that he was right to be wary. We have seen the banks use it more as a mechanism for shifting the burden of fraud onto the consumer more than anything else. (Not to mention stories like this.)

I usually feel equipped to fight my corner and defend whatever I have written on this blog. The very few times that Chris Lightfoot left a comment (on my old site; his comments were on the Haloscan system, so will have disappeared into the internet black hole) were the exception. He changed my mind.

His blog was always well worth a read. I would almost always learn something from his posts which were frequently backed by a mind-boggling graph. He might not have updated his “real” blog for a long time, but I always kept my eye on his linklog. Many posts on his linklog were decent enough blog posts in their own right. There were plenty of very interesting links posted there. He was still updating it quite recently.

I also enjoyed his novel take on those online political surveys. Having two axes instead of one is kind of old news. But what he plotted on the actual axes caused people to do a double-take. But he did it on the basis of actual data. It made sense and allows us to understand the political landscape a little bit better. I was looking forward to any political surveys he might have done in the future.

From the various tributes that have been written over the past day or two by those who knew him considerably better than I did, it is clear that Chris Lightfoot was entirely selfless and helpful. He was also innovative and very clever as well as highly principled and passionate in the causes he believed in. Most importantly, he believed in the right causes.

I can’t help but wonder if the world without Chris Lightfoot is a slightly more dangerous place.

Update: Forgot to mention also that yesterday the first campaign leaflet for the Scottish elections plopped on the doormat yesterday. Every time I come across a piece of election literature I think of Chris Lightfoot’s brilliant blog post on how he decided who to vote for:

read each manifesto until you encounter something really offensive or stupid, then stop and reject that party.

1 comment

This blog as a graph

27 May 2006 01:28

Categories: Admin, General, Technology

Ever wondered what this blog would look like as a graph? What do you mean ‘no’?!

Anyway, this nifty little website does it for you. I do like these kind of things. Kind of pointless but not, and quite pretty anyway.

This page explains what it all means. Grey is everything else apparently, so I wonder what all those grey ones at the top of my graph are. It looks like a dandelion.

Via Cage of Monkeys.

Update: Heh, I forgot the link: here it is.

1 comment