Data blog » steve carufel

Birmingham City Council’s anti-obesity funding plunges 92%

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/

Interactive: Pyeongchang 2018’s athletic composition by discipline, country and genre

See below to explore in this Tableau dataviz which country sent how many athletes, by discipline and genre to Pyeongchang 2018.

Only one Birmingham-based organisation present at the World Economic Forum

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.

Study finds teenagers are actually aged from 10 to 24 years old, and this is where they must be hanging out in Birmingham

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.

Infographic: the Carillion collapse, explained

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.