A picture of health

I wanted this graphic to give an overview of data on Climate Change reporting in Science News sections of various media. The data comes from a book chapter by Boyce & Lewis (full reference is on the graphic itself). They surveyed stories in evening news bulletins on BBC1 and ITV, the Today programme on Radio 4, and six national daily newspapers and six Sunday newspapers. The message in the chapter was that CC reporting went up in all media, and especially in TV. However, looking at the graphic I'm not so sure that's significant. If you look at the patterns in TV reporting, it seems far less stable than the other media. And the change in newspapers actually looks pretty minimal when shown in visual form... If nothing else, my graphic makes me want to see more data before making up my mind about this one...

This graphic shows some data from the NHS staff survey in 2009. Specifically, it looks at what 66872 people said when they were asked if their Primary Care Trust provided care that they would be happy with for one of their friends or relatives. I can see why it's tempting to write shock stories like this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/mar/18/nhs-staff-survey but the bars on the right show an overwhelmingly positive response around the country. The ranking of trusts in the middle, when presented on the map to the left, doesn't reveal much in the way of a pattern - apart from in London. I think it's really interesting to see the (often specialist hospitals) in central London showing up in dark blue, while the more general outer London Trusts are far more towards the pink end of the scale.

This graphic was an attempt to show the proportion of money spent on different departments in the 2009 UK budget (the width of the pie "slices") - but also the change from the previous year (the darker shaded areas, which extend away from the centre for increases, and towards the centre for decreases in spending). The Inner ring shows the main departments, and the outer ring shows this broken down into sub-departments. I'm not sure how successful the graphic is (HMT, for example, should be many times larger in size thanks to bailing out the banks that year). Percentages are tricky like that...

This data shows how 9 MA Graphic Arts students thought that the concepts of "sense", "action" and "static" relate to the three shapes circle, square and triangle. Some agreement on triangle being related to "action", and not to "static", but otherwise a range of different responses. Here's a link for the slides .