For quite a while now I have been submitting and managing Freedom of Information requests to more than a hundred universities in the United Kingdom.
While the issue around ever-skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals subscriptions isn’t news, I wanted to see whether, since the topic went in the mainstream, the awareness around it had any effect on what the universities are paying.
Electoral party results!
A screenshot of the interactive map, which you can find in the links below.
Ahead of today’s upcoming results (and previously published elsewhere), here is a map of the new wards over the former ones with their past electoral results (winning party).
See the story here for the Birmingham Eastside and here for Birmingham Live!
Additionally, here is a more detailed description of a few wards that were merged from former wards won by different parties.
As time progresses, it is less and less likely that the Leave voters of 2016 will ever see the fruits of their vote if they had in mind that promise of extra weekly money for the NHS in millions.
Despite the widely publicised economy of £350 million a week that was promised for the NHS, there is close to no one left to say that this figure can be achieved anytime soon. Not even those who suggested it. And with good reasons.
Birmingham City FC has been fined for breaking national minimum wage laws, newly released data reveals. The local club is part of a group of four that have been identified in the latest analysis by the Department for Business and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The three others are St Helens RFC, Stoke City FC and Yeovil Town FC.
But the local city club and St. Helens RFC are by far the biggest offenders, owing each to their minimum wage employees more than £5,500.
Read more here and see how clubs reacted.
Spending by Birmingham City Council on countering obesity has plummeted in the last 12 months, according to data collected by The Bureau Local and shared with Birmingham Eastside.
The figures reveal that funding to tackle obesity in adults dropped by 92% since 2013/2014 — from more than £5.6 million to less than half a million.
Meanwhile, spending related to physical activity in adults has dropped by 20% in the last 12 months alone.
Read the story and see the visualisation for each of the West Midlands’ local authorities like Coventry, Wolverhampton and others here ➡ http://birminghameastside.com/2018/02/08/obesity-funding-birmingham-austerity/
See below to explore in this Tableau dataviz which country sent how many athletes, by discipline and genre to Pyeongchang 2018.
What was hopefully going to be another data map story ended up being a purely informative, general knowledge piece. Imagine you are planning to map all the bars that are playing rock music in the city, to see if there is any pattern, where rock music enthusiasts should hang out, and so on.
Well, when only one bar makes the list, there’s no point in mapping it. Data journos can have an idea of what that means: lots of time spent on data scraping and cleaning, only to write a story that looks pretty much conventional.
This is what happened when I tried to make a list of all the Birmingham-based groups present at Davos this year. The city probably did not receive a lot of invites as only one organisation was found there.
See which one, and read the full story here.
I love maps. So when this teenagers-are-actually-10-to-24-years-old study came in, we made a map to show where they are the most likely to hang out and argue about their true age. Do play with it below!
Map and story were also published here.
One week was the Carillion week in the UK news. A construction Goliath collapse, on its own, with no David around. The early signs were numerous but not that obvious to everyone, so a useful infographic goes a long way in explaining to non-experts how did something that big occurred.
