Greater Glasgow gets a lot of coverage for its poor health through having the lowest average lifespans in the UK. Although residents of the Welsh Valleys – the post-industrial areas north of Cardiff – don’t have such short lives, they are most likely to be living with poor health. The three UK council areas where more than 10% of adults say they are in bad or very bad health are in south Wales: Neath Port Talbot (10.5%), Blaneau Gwent (10.7%) and Merthyr Tydfil (11.1%). Continue reading “Unhealthy valleys: Wales’ problem with ill-health”
Category: Maps
Coxit map: council reorganisation that breaks up Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire is an odd place. The rural district councils are strongly Conservative; Oxford itself is strongly anyone but the Conservatives. The trend in local government is towards unitary councils which do everything, but how would that work in Oxfordshire?
The simplest model would be a unitary Oxfordshire Council (as in Cornwall and Wiltshire), but Oxford and rural Oxfordshire are politically chalk and cheese. The next option would be to turn the city into a unitary and merge the rural districts into one or more unitaries.
However, a plan from Oxfordshire’s five lower-tier councils endorsed by the county’s MPs is a bit more complicated. Oxford City Council would become a unitary and the two districts in the south of Oxfordshire would merge – South Oxfordshire and Vale of the White Horse already share offices and services. Continue reading “Coxit map: council reorganisation that breaks up Oxfordshire”
Welcome our new robo-journalist overlords
My second email newsletter discusses robo-journalists, for some an object of job-based fear. However, based on trying out Automated Insight’s natural language generation system Wordsmith and following Kent Brockman I for one welcome our new robo-journalist overlords; although that’s because I reckon they will be human.
A preview: Continue reading “Welcome our new robo-journalist overlords”
New email newsletter: Predictably bad
I have just sent out the first edition of my new email newsletter, which I plan to publish each month or thereabouts. It covers what I’ve been working on – in this issue, my data journalism course at City Lit – articles I have written and those I have spotted elsewhere, and things I am looking for help on from my many friends in public relations.
Here’s a preview: Continue reading “New email newsletter: Predictably bad”
Mapping urban health challenges for the Guardian with Mapbox
As a follow-up to the article I wrote last month on health, data and cities, Guardian Healthcare Professionals Network has today published a piece by me on future threats to urban health. I got great ideas from the World Health Organisation, the UN University International Institute for Global Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the New York Academy of Medicine. You can read the article here.
I was also commissioned to produce interactive mapping for the article, showing a selection of the cities under threat and some that have developed innovative ways to tackle these problems. I used Mapbox to develop the mapping, given its choice of basemaps, marker symbols and colours and my experience in using it to produce new maps for this site.
Continue reading “Mapping urban health challenges for the Guardian with Mapbox”