We saw Europe in the eyes of different countries a while back. Christoph Niemann, for The New York Times, runs with the idea and made this handy world map of stereotypes. My favorite is the arrogant arrows in Europe. True?
We saw Europe in the eyes of different countries a while back. Christoph Niemann, for The New York Times, runs with the idea and made this handy world map of stereotypes. My favorite is the arrogant arrows in Europe. True?
OECD, with the help of Moritz Stefaner and Raureif, promote a well-being index beyond GDP in the Better Life Initiative:
There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics — This index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 tpoics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.
Based on topics such as health, housing, and education, each country is represented with a flower, and each petal on a flower represents a metric. The higher the index, the higher the flower appears on the vertical axis, and if the flower metaphor is too abstract for you, roll over each flower to see the breakdown by bar graph.
The strength of the tool is in the level of interaction it allows you and the ability to create your own index by weighting factors how you see fit. For example, do you value health over all other factors? Weigh that more, and the flowers update accordingly.
Finally, you can focus on specific topics such as housing to see how countries rank in each area and information on what indicators were used to compute each sub-index. The environment index, for example, is based solely on air pollution levels, whereas the education index takes educational attainment and reading skills into account.
So whether you're interested in a specific country, topic, or a group of topics, the interactive tools lets you see world data from plenty of angles. How does your country compare?
[OECD Better Life Index | Thanks, Moritz & Jerome]
OECD, with the help of Moritz Stefaner and Raureif, promote a well-being index beyond GDP in the Better Life Initiative:
There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics — This index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 tpoics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.
Based on topics such as health, housing, and education, each country is represented with a flower, and each petal on a flower represents a metric. The higher the index, the higher the flower appears on the vertical axis, and if the flower metaphor is too abstract for you, roll over each flower to see the breakdown by bar graph.
The strength of the tool is in the level of interaction it allows you and the ability to create your own index by weighting factors how you see fit. For example, do you value health over all other factors? Weigh that more, and the flowers update accordingly.
Finally, you can focus on specific topics such as housing to see how countries rank in each area and information on what indicators were used to compute each sub-index. The environment index, for example, is based solely on air pollution levels, whereas the education index takes educational attainment and reading skills into account.
So whether you're interested in a specific country, topic, or a group of topics, the interactive tools lets you see world data from plenty of angles. How does your country compare?
[OECD Better Life Index | Thanks, Moritz & Jerome]
Early retirement. That's what most people want, unless you're lucky enough to love working. When you have the luxury of retiring early though, why not take advantage? According to OECD estimates for life expectancy and retirement ages, in countries like Mexico, it is common for men to work up to the last year of their lives. On the other hand, women in Austria spend an average of 26 years in retirement.
In the United States the average years in retirement is 10 years for men and 16 years for women (mostly because men typically die earlier)—among the least in the world.
When will you be retiring?
Do you understand how time zones work around the world and when exactly you need to move your watch forward or back? Me neither. BBC News provides a brief history of time zones via interactive globe.
Theoretically, the world should be divide into 24 equal time zones, in which each zone differs from the last by one hour. But as the years have passed, the world has turned into a much more complicated place. Time zones are now much more irregular and sometimes seem positively eccentric, affected as they are by political, geographical and social changes in the real world.
Rotate the globe to see where each time zone lands. Some of the zones seem relatively straight, but even in some areas like the GMT-2 time zone, there's some crookedness. There must be some small islands there or something. It's either that or the Royal Observatory is fond of puzzles. No, there aren't any other options.
[BBC News via @kelsosCorner]
Continuing their series on world population, National Geographic focuses in on the "most typical" person in the world. The above image is an artist's rendering of the average face computed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Zoom in and you'll see that the face is made of 7,000 human figures, as shown below. It's true. I counted.
The face is based on photos collected over ten years from several national technology research programs, however, it only seems to be Chinese faces. If that's the case, then obviously it's not really the "face of seven billion." It's also not the world's most typical person. The video below has some similar weird logic.
Okay, wait. I got it. Think of it like this: by "typical" they're referring to mode rather than mean or median. Still though, the feature is better labeled as the face of China. Oh forget it. It is what it is.
[National Geographic | Thanks, Maegan]
