Welcome Back 007

As Bond aficionados (and I count myself one) await the latest Bond movie, The Economist Daily Chart (of which I'm also an aficionado) featured some deeply meaningful charts. These charts just might be as hilarious as a Bond movie.

This first one compares the martini/romances/kill ratio for each of the Bond actors or as The Economist so quaintly puts it, booze, bonks and bodies. Connery had the highest ratio of conquests - why doesn't this surprise me - while Brosnan has the highest proportion of kills - and this did surprise me.

Here's a chart showing the loose connection between ratings (at least as shown on IMDB) and box office success. Click here to view it on the Economist web site where it's interactive.

Helping to Understand the Middle East

If you have trouble understanding who's who, and who supports whom in the Middle East, here's an awesome chart from the Economist.

You can interactively mouse over the chart if you go directly to The Economist here. The chart is dated in April, so probably some things have changed, but this certainly gives you a great start.

What's in a word? Thugocracy

The Economist has again proved its deftness with the English language.

In an article about South-East Asia, the article stated that ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asia Nations) had only four stable countries. Two were described as dictatorships (Laos and Vietnam). One was an Islamic Sultanate - Brunei. The last one, Cambodia, was described as a thugocracy. What a wonderful word!

Other Posts on Words:

Apple

Handy

Genocide
Digitalization
Digital Slime

Rob Ford: Serially Scandalous

The Economist has such a way with words.   In their article on How harmful is crack cocaine?, The Economist describes Rob Ford as "Toronto's serially scandalous major". Sigh. What a way for Toronto to be (in)famous.  The article includes a reference to a study* comparing the relative harm caused by different drugs.

So, Rob Ford hits both #1 and #3 on the list.  I love this photo from cbc.ca.

One third of Torontonians still support this moron.  Wonder what drug they're consuming?

* "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis", by David Nutt, Leslie King and Lawrence Phillips, on behalf of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. The Lancet.

Gender Equality

Why would the World Economic Forum care about gender equality?  Because there is a "strong correlation between a country's gender gap and its economic competitiveness." (See the WEF Global Gender Gap Report here).   

The WEF measured gender equality (or lack thereof) in the economic, political, health and education spheres.  Not surprisingly, Nordic countries are at the top of the gender equality rankings, led by Iceland and Finland, but there were some surprises, like the Philippines and Nicaragua making it to the top 10.  The map below shows a colour coding of the degree of gender equality around the world.

Each country's score is illustrated by a spider chart.  An interesting collection of those spider charts formed part of The Economist's daily chart here.

Canada ranked 20th in gender equality, slightly behind the UK (18th) and slightly ahead of the US (23rd).  Canada was ranked ninth in economic participation and opportunity as well as education. Personally, I think that the high economic score would have arisen primarily because of participation with high rates of employment and indicators like bank accounts. However, opportunity is definitely skewed, with the study showing a mere 6% female board directors at public companies.  Female board representation is a subject of great controversy here in Canada and it appears there may soon be some proactive efforts to increase the proportion of women.  Canada ranked very low in political participation; our four month flirtation with Kim Campbell with our first and only female prime minister didn't lift our standings much in that category!  One can't help thinking that one's own country should be better than this.

The Gleam of Chrome

The Economist, my favourite magazine, has taught me many things about the world,  and it has made me see things I know about through a new lens.  You know - an explanation of something you already understand that causes a penny to drop and suddenly you have a whole new insight.  The brilliant writing is incisive, colourful, and sometimes downright hilarious.

The magic that The Economist weaves with words is repeated in their brilliant graphics.  I knew Chrome was gaining popularity, but leave it to The Economist to show it so dramatically in this infographic of the most popular browsers by country.  

For me, the greatest single convenience is the ability to type in either a URL, or a Google search term and that turned me into an early adopter.  I was certainly in a small minority when I started to use it a few years ago, but I've noticed, for instance, that two thirds of the people visiting this blog are Chrome users, so I wasn't surprised by these stats.  Because Chrome is free, there isn't much friction in its march on the browser market, but the total reversal of market share is nevertheless truly amazing.

Just look at the comparison between 2011 and 2013.  Amazing.

Digital Assets

What's going to happen to your digital assets after your death?  Your music, your emails, your books, and all that other electronic 'stuff'?  Did you know that most online agreements say that access and ownership terminate after death?  Hmm.  An excellent article in The Economist got me thinking.....

Ushahidi

One of the speakers at the TEDx conference, Juliana Rotich, is a co-founder of Ushahidi.  There is an interesting reference to Ushahidi in a recent Economist article here.  It certainly whats one's appetite for hearing her speaker at TEDx.