Toffee Milkshake

To me, the sad thing is that expensive films are now dominated by the visual-effects houses. And who are the artists of the visual-effects houses? You know, nerds who have spent their whole lives looking at comic books and video games. So that’s where they get all their visual ideas. That’s why there is an endless repetition of visual ideas in so-called spectacular fantasy or in science fiction.

Creating a good piece of data journalism or a good data-driven app is often more like an art than a science. Like photography, it involves selection, filtering, framing, composition and emphasis.

Everyone had our media one-sheet. Everyone (we thought) was on the same page about which accounts to tag in their Tweets and Facebook posts, which hashtag(s) to use for which subject/campaign, and who to go to for questions …

And then Justin Bieber tweeted with a different hashtag: #BILLBOARDawards

The cowardice of Brent’s Labour council in stripping Kensal Rise library, and the philistinism of unscrewing the brass plaque remembering Mark Twain from its wall, in the middle of the night, would horrify anyone who still recalls Labour’s founding mission to share education, knowledge and hope with the people. We will continue to fight for our library,

Fighting people who are wrong on the internet!

I try not to argue on the internet too much for all the obvious reasons but combating innumeracy with graphics is like my dream Jeopardy category so here goes:

James on twitter drew my attention to this quote from a paper by the Center for Social Justice (note I haven’t read most of the paper):

The first methodological flaw of the Government’s central measure of poverty is that it is defined in relative terms. The result of this is that the poor will always exist statistically, as it is inevitable that some in society will have less than others.

It isn’t the first time that someone who gets paid to understand this stuff has failed to understand this stuff. Here’s Frank “poverty czar” Field back in 2010:

Any candidate sitting GCSE maths should be able to explain that raising everybody above a set percentage of median income is rather like asking a cat to catch its own tail. As families are raised above the target level of income, the median point itself rises.

Actually any candidate sitting GCSE maths should be able to tell you that both these quotes are wrong.

Here is a chart illustrating how using a relative measure of poverty (the one we actually use, below 60% median income = poor) you might distribute incomes so that no one would be in poverty (note to the CSJ: Don’t worry, some people still have more  money than others!):

There are lots of other ways you can achieve this but this is the one which requires pretty much the least adjustment from the current distribution of incomes. You can play around with the chart and find your own preferred distribution here.

The median is actually a bit of a tricky concept to get an intuitive grasp of, one of the reasons that this simple interactive chart is one of my favourite things I’ve built is that 1. it didn’t take very long and 2. it really shows how well interactive graphics can make abstract concepts more tangible, allowing people to explore a system’s possibility space*.

That said, however difficult the idea of the median might be there’s not really any excuse for people who are paid to understand this stuff not understanding it (esp if they’re being paid by the tax payer and/ or their lack of understanding might condemn people to lives of actual physical hardship and early death). I mean, to write a critique of the way in which something is measured without actually having a reasonable grasp of that measurement kind of undermines any conclusions you might come to don’t you think?

Bonus content! Some other poverty reduction strategies:

* also everyone liked my smiley face design which is the kind of thing I normally never get through all the checkpoints (for perfectly good reasons) :)

PS James also says…

Does anyone else apart from CSJ remember Blair-Brown years as featuring “astonishingly high levels of income redistribution”?

Bodenstandig 2000 - Banker Tom

Tom hears Peter Schilling on FM radio
He knows "Travelling the Cosmos is my passion"
Until soon after a space shuttle exploded on TV
And the mother said: "Better become a doctor"

And so he didn't become a space ship conductor
[The human has been neutralized]
And so he became a banker
[The human has been neutralized]
And the sun sets, time passes by
Tom continues waiting for the seriousness in life

Tom sees a girl with a ring through her eyebrow
Excited, he has to look a second time
He says: "I will have such a ring through my nose"
The mother says: "We'll have to talk about this"

And so he didn't become a punk
[The human has been neutralized]
And so he became a banker
[The human has been neutralized]
And the sun sets, time passes by
Tom continues waiting for the seriousness in life

Tom reads the "Happy Computer" magazine and is fascinated
Wau Holland writes: "Information wants to be free"
Tom now wants to give away source code for free as well
The mother says: "One has to think about one's pension"

And so he didn't become a GNU fore-thinker
And so he became a banker
And the sun sets, time passes by
Tom continues waiting for the seriousness in life

Tom's feet rested too long under the father's table
He wants to afford a leather sofa
David Hamilton snaps the application photo
The bank boss likes the color of his tie
In his CV there is no astronaut or rocker
Instead it's printed with CV-O-MAT(TM) from TopWare(R)
The mother presents to him a world time clock for group leaders
to help with international business transactions

And so he became a banker
[And you, comrade?]
Whom he consults goes insolvent not before tomorrow
And the sun sets, time passes by
Which brings us to the end of Tom's path of life