“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
A broken system: Latin America is the only region in the world where murder rates increased in the first decade of this century. Plenty of factors explain Latin America’s crime disease. The drug trade, a bulge of young, poorly educated men, income inequality and access to firearms are some. But perhaps the most important is the pervasive weakness in the basic institutions of the rule of law. As our map shows, trust in the criminal-justice system remains low in all countries.
Interesting data visualization, although the little pie charts (which I am never a fan of) leave something to be desired. I assume the blue wedge is the one we’re interested in but if I were a cynical reader of charts (read: I am) I might wonder if the white were actually the representative wedge, meant to be ambiguous or misleading. The legend is not actually helpful in this case. For the amount of space the pie charts take up, I would just label the countries with the percentage itself.
To summarize: pie charts are basically never the right way to go. Otherwise, very well-packed visualization.
visualizing leptokurtic vs. platykurtic
I keep hearing kurtosis described graphically as the “thickness of the tails”, but I know I’m not alone in finding this unhelpful when looking at histograms and trying to determine whether something is lepto- or platykurtic - even with a Normal distribution drawn on top for comparison.
I personally prefer Wikipedia’s description which describes kurtosis as the measure of “peakedness”, rather than the “thickness” of the “tails”. When looking at a uniform or multimodal distribution, the concept of tails isn’t really useful for me. But I can see when a distribution looks more or less peaked in the middle, or wider toward the top. Try looking at the following graph with that in mind and see what I mean:
Also this:
Hope someone else finds that useful! If you have any tips of your own please share.