Info

Posts by Natasha Madov

http://homicide.igarape.org.br/

Igarapé is a Brazilian think tank that released a comprehensive dataset of worldwide murder statistics. It is presented in the form of a animated globe, that you can drag around and click for information on homicide in each country. It is made in Javascript.

Good things:

– The full dataset is available to download and clearly marked;

– Some countries have regional data, on states/provinces. There is an emphasis on Latin America and Caribbean;

– They provide info number of homicides, homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants, evolution across the years, weapons mostly used and prevailing age and gender of the victims;

Not so good things:

– The datasets are very diverse in sources and dates. Some countries have very long historical series, some don’t. The application does a good job of making these sources and dates very clear, but it still gives me doubt of how much they can be comparable. Ex: in African countries, if the country is going through a civil war or peaceful times will make a lot of difference in the data;

– An animation shows the top ten homicide countries in the world. It isn’t a very clear when it starts and stops, and it’s the only ranking available in the site. I can’t figure out how a particular country ranks;

– The site is available for mobile but doesn’t work very well in an iPhone;

All in all, a good dataviz tackling a very difficult subject and dataset.

 

 

 

 

In May 2014 there were 8 million retail salespeople and cashiers working in the US, the two single occupations with the largest employment in the country. At the same time, another 8.3 million people were working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) jobs in the country. Both represent around 6% of the total employment in the US, according to the latest numbers of the Occupational Employment Statistics, released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The difference between these two? The salaries. While the two top retail jobs only pay median salaries of $25,760 for retail salesperson and $20,670 for cashier, STEM jobs have mean wages a lot higher of the all-occupations average in the country, which is $47,230. Among the best paid STEM jobs are petroleum engineers, with $147,520 and physicists, with $117,300.

Let’s show graphically the salary difference between those two groups, in which the same amout of people are making so little in one end, and so much in the other. Let’s talk to experts on what this wage gap represents, too.

James Brown
Executive Director of STEM Education Coalition
(202) 400-2192 (office) / jfbrown@stemedcoalition.org

National Retail Federation
Treacy Reynolds
Media Relations Coordinator
(202) 495-7221

Kathryn L. Shaw
Professor of Economics who has a paper on retail wages at National Bureau of Economic Research.
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Tel: 650/725-4168
Fax: 650/725-0468