A picture of health

I like to eat locally produced food when I can. It tends to be fresher, and it takes less energy to get it to me. However, as I've grown up in a world of global commerce and supermarkets, I tend to miss out on good seasonal food. I find that asparagus season is pretty much over before I've noticed, for example. Hence the calendar shown above. Creating this has firstly showed me why I can't remember the seasons for all the fruit and vegetables. A) There are a lot of them B) They all overlap, and are very different lengths. I was going to put on seafood and meat as well, but I quickly realised that the text would be illegible. So fruit and vegetables will have to do for now. I'll be using it myself to see how well it works. I might have to do a sequel with fish and game though, if this one proves popular. If anyone would like to print one off and use it, please do, and let me know how you got on with it. It needs to be printed on A2 paper, which should be possible at your...

The atmosphere. It's probably a good thing, obviously. But do we really appreciate all the things it does for us? This graphic is based on work by two of my colleagues at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, Dr Michaela Kendall* and Gyula Kothencz. It explains how different parts of the atmosphere play different roles in supporting our lives. I was going to have a nice curve of the earth at the bottom to orient the viewer. However, as its circumference is around 40,000km at the equator, the curvature wasn't really discernible in any way, even in the wide lines that separate out the different altitudes (the one at the top of the troposphere is called the tropopause, apparently, if you're into that kind of thing). * See Thornes, J et al. 2010. Communicating the Value of Atmospheric Services. Meteorological Applications 17(2); 243 - 250.

This graphic is based on data from the UK's Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)*. It shows how our carbon emissions in 2009 break down into different sectors. I'm not sure how much I trust the data. For example, the largest category in "business" is "other industrial combustion". How that's been categorised as anything other than industrial, I'm really not sure... I've actually made two versions of the graphic showing the data as I found it. The one shown here (above) is simpler, and probably more suitable for screen presentation. The second includes detail of the subcategories, but due to the text size is really meant to be printed as a poster. You can find it here: http://www.willstahl.com/UKcarbon_v13_L.pdf ---------------------------------- *The data can be found here: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/climate_change/data/data.asp

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 .