It’s summer, middle of June, you are getting up, looking out of the window and the sun smiles at you. You get dressed, thinking of nothing evil, but when you want to leave for work you suddenly realize it’s only 13°C. Five minutes later dark clouds cover the sun and a chilly breeze blows under your much too light clothes. You realize, you are not dressed appropriately.
You realize, you are not in Germany any more. Continue reading rain/deer
Hello again, it’s been a while since I have been posting something. The reason, however, is the same as for every other inconsistently writing blog owner. I am not paid for writing blog posts, but for writing other more boring stuff (not necessarily though!) like scientific articles, experimental documentations and manuals. And sometimes life gets even more demanding and beautiful as well, when you have a new job, relationship or get a kid (number one and three, in my case). However, some things have not changed and one of these is my interest in this blog, especially when you think of the current refugee ‘crisis’ and how many people in Germany deal with it.
I great opportunity to revive my writing has just struck me. My former flatmate Philipp, who is travelling the world and blogging about it, just awarded me for the Liebster award. However, this is not a real award, it’s a blogosphere nominating game where you have to answer 11 questions and re-nominate 11 other blogs you like to read. The conscious reader immediately foresees the exponential development of ‘awardees’.
I nevertheless take the opportunity and accept the award, say thanks and best wishes to Philipp, and answer his eleven questions. Here we go. Continue reading Meet: EuropeByNumbeRs
Roughly a week has passed since Scotland decided about leaving or staying in the UK via referendum. As written in my last post the polls were far from being clear and it was a head-to-head race until the very end: Scotland decided not to leave the UK and the rest is history. But now, as dust has settled a bit and UK officials are relieved by the outcome of the referendum, it’s time to take a closer look on the results.
First, we can take a look on a map of Scotland with election results ordered by ‘council area’ or, simply put, counties.
The more red you see the more people said NO to Scottish independence, but be aware that the coloring does not cover the full 100 % of the scale. That means, although an overwhelming majority of counties voted against independence, it was still very close in most counties itself. Notably, only a handful of counties reached more than 50 % YES votes and these were the urban areas of Glasgow and Dundee.
Nothing special so far, but we can still dive deeper into the election results by taking social data into consideration. Using the official report on income and poverty, we can correlate the votes for independence (YES) with these measures. In the following figure, every dot represents one county. There is no clear correlation with the first two variables (Population and Turnout) but indeed for the next two: Counties with higher income and lower poverty rate voted against independence and for staying in the UK!
Continue reading Scotland: Wealthy counties said NO to independence
The European elections are long gone. But a little distance is often useful for an objective analysis of the matter. As discussed in my last post, we could observe a slight shift from centre to right direction in electoral behaviour, but this is not as serious as the dramatic decline of turnout over the years. However, the European parties are literally melting pots of a diverse selection of different parties, loosely grouped by common interests. You can find moderate and extremist national parties being members of the European blocks. The centre-right (christian-democratic) EPP alone counts 72 national parties as its members, among them populist right-wing parties like Fidesz from Hungary.
The extreme right-wing parties are often small and don’t show up in European policy. But how many people actually support them on the national level? This info graphic gives the answer, assembling the percentage of votes for strong right-wing parties in national elections of the last six years.
Naturally, maps like these are a simplification: the political profile of each party may be very different. For instance, Italy seems to be a country just on the edge of nationalistic uproar, but the right-wing party included in this data set is actually a coalition and quite moderate compared to others.
Let’s take a closer look on my home country, Germany. Its genuine right-wing party is the NPD, once in a while even conquering a small share in federal and regional elections. It’s a right-wing party from the text book, being so radical it’s more than dubious if they even adhere to the most fundamental ideas of the German constitution. Therefore, in 2001 and 2012 lawsuits were initiated to exclude the party from political activity. The latest one, which is still pending, got much support by an alleged link between the party’s activities and the racist killings of the terror group NSU. This group of only two man and one woman managed to kill 10 turkish or greek people all across Germany from 2001 to 2011, without the authorities even noticing it could be a racist motivation behind.
Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, 152 people lost their live in attacks most likely motivated by right-wing hate and ideology. These maps illustrating all cases are courtesy of ZEIT online, where you can find more resources on each casualty (German only).
Sources: Le Monde diplomatique’s Atlas of globalisation, ZEIT online.
These are thrilling times for news agencies. Many hot topics are dominating the headlines right now, seeking for attention: The turmoil in Iraq, ongoing civil war in Syria, the Ukraine crisis and, of course, the football world championship. Among all these troubling and exciting developments, a very important event is threatened to get lost in the public opinion. Roughly one month ago, the European Parliament was elected by the citizens of the 28 EU member states. Now that the dust has settled the election results will lead to restructuring of the political landscape. For many people (and for me as well), European policy has always been boring, ‘far away’ and of inferior importance.
However, this election is different. Thanks to the Treaty of Lisbon from 2009, some important changes are taking place. Despite the gut feeling of many people that the EU is gaining more and more power, the citizens now have more power themselves to stir EU policy. One important novelty is that the European Parliament is now indirectly able to determine the President of the EU commission, which is the powerful executive branch of the EU and usually proposes new laws. The ongoing debate between the two opponents Martin Schulz (social democrats) and Jean-Claude Juncker (conservatives) on who will be the next commissioner reflects this new situation. However, the candidate is actually proposed by the European Council (the 28 heads of the member states), which is only obliged to take the EU parliament’s preferences into consideration. These are the results of this year’s EU Parliament election compared to 2009.
It’s been a while, since I last wrote about a subject, and the one I’ll be writing about now is really inconvenient for most of us. But it matters.
It matters because most people have a job and earn money, but are not paid everything listed on their payroll. The reason for that is that your country or state collects taxes to finance the common infrastructure for its inhabitants. There are many different models for collecting taxes, many different ‘goods’ to tax, and even more ways to spend the collected money. In general, authorities collect three different major taxes:
There are many more specific taxes or different ‘flavors’ of the same tax. Here, I visualized the rates of the three major taxes (as listed on wikipedia) using R and the spplot package. I ended up with the following maps. Note that the color key counter-intuitively shows high taxes in blue and low taxes in alarming red, because we want to identify the villainous countries with extraordinary low tax rates.
Obviously, Western European countries have similar tax rates and we cannot readily identify tax haven countries. There are some exceptions, though, like the low corporate tax in Portugal and Ireland or low VAT rates in Switzerland. Is this it? Don’t we have more interesting tax refuges to offer in Europe? The answer is not visible in those maps, because size matters.
First, why are low taxes a problem at all? Because, every individual or company who can afford will try to evade tax paying as best as it can. What seems just natural to save money and gain a competitive advantage, is in reality a major burden to our society. Globalized trading and electronic cash flow made it easy to shift huge amounts of money from high tax countries to tax havens—most often tiny states without notable industry or resources. The bottom line is that the high tax country provides all the infrastructure for running a company, while only the tax haven benefits from the company’s profits at no own expenses. And here’s a proper list of European’s tax havens.
Sources: wikipedia.org, Deutsche Welle report on tax havens.
# download world shapefile from http://aprsworld.net/gisdata/world/
# import europe map
europe <- readShapeSpatial(fn="europe.simple", IDvar="SP_ID")
# import data
tax <- read.csv("taxes.csv"); tax$Country <- toupper(tax$Country)
# merge data.frames
europe@data <- merge(europe@data, tax, by.x="NAME", by.y="Country", all=TRUE, sort=FALSE)
europe@data <- europe@data[order(as.numeric(as.character(europe@data$SP_ID))), ]
# plot the map
cols <- colorRampPalette(c("#FF4500", "#FFD700", "#89C755", "#4D5773"))(20)
spplot(europe, 9:11,
xlim=c(2.5e+06, 6.5e+06), ylim=c(1.45e+06, 5.4e+06),
col.regions=cols,
as.table=TRUE, col="white", strip=FALSE
)
It was about time. The rear wheel was rusty, the chain was squeaking, one of the tubes had been mended for the third time. The brake wire was torn apart for the second time – and it’s the only brake. My old city bike was indeed a wreck and one of the reasons for that -besides it being old- was driving in the winter season. But not the temperature damages the bike, but the humidity, the salt distributed to get rid of the street’s ice cover, and the lousy condition of many streets altogether. Every scratch on the paint was the starting point for beautiful blossoms of rust on the frame. I needed a new bike.
And not just anyone. Since I already owned a racing bike and the old one for the winter, it had to be one of those sleek single speed bikes where driving in the summer promised to be fun. I ordered a very simple (and inexpensive) Gepida bike forged in Hungary. The parts are, naturally, from somewhere far East and altogether of lower quality, but the frame is really nice.
The second part of the image is an impression of the scenery where I ride the bike, a perfect example of a bike track in Leipzig. In the beginning properly separated from cars, it turns into a merely decorated part of the road and finally ends in Nowhere… Always a funny situation, when cars and cyclists are brought together so instantly. But honestly: There have to be exemplary city governments who brought up better and more sustainable solutions than just painting the road with a few white stripes. And indeed there are. When I was abroad in Turku, the first surprising thing for me (besides the language) were two-laned bike tracks separated from the cars by lots of green.
Here in Germany most cities are tailor-made for car traffic, and that is true for many other EU countries as well. To get an overview how willing people in the EU are to cycle in the city, we can plot data from an EU comission survey. And as extra candy, add the European ‘capitals’ of bike friendliness.
On April 15, the Boston marathon was target of a terroristic attack. Two students originally from Kazakhstan, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, placed improvised bombs which detonated during the marathon killing three and injuring several hundred people. In contrast to previous incidents, the two brothers’ attack appears to be the result of a very individual and silent (religious) radicalization, but many questions about the motives remain. However, once more the strong Islamic background seems to play a major role, and this is the bottom-line for the public.
Consequently, a major German news paper called ‘Die Welt’ just issued an article about the role of Islam in Germany accompanied by a poll about the perception of Islam and other religions in Germany. Thirteen thousand people were asked, if, in their opinion, the Islam fits into the western society. This was negated by around 53 %, more than e.g. in Great Britain (46 %) but less than in Spain (65 %). Next, people were asked if they perceive the different religions as enriching or threatening for society:
Yesterday, a very rare event took place, the current Pope, Benedict XVI resigned. He is the second Pope I knew at his life time, after the most popular John Paul II, and the 8th in the history of popes who originated from Germany, or what you would call the respective country of the time. For me, this is a most attractive occasion to dive a little bit into the history of Papacy. What was certainly often said in the media was that the resignation of a pope last happened in the year 1294 by Pope Celestine V.
There may be various reasons for Pope Benedict to take this rare step, such as age, the abuse scandals of the catholic church or power plays within the Curia itself. The announcement to resign came very surprising, nevertheless, and since then rumours about the successor on the Holy See have arisen. Some of the rumours say, the next Pope should originate from the developing world, where the number of followers to the catholic church increased most. With the upcoming decision in mind, it’s time for a retrospection. The list of Popes from wikipedia helped to plot this map of birth places (if it is known) of all 266 former Popes.
Quite some time has passed since my last post. Unfortunately, I was busy with work. As a PhD student in the life sciences, you have to spent some time in the lab, and when you have spent enough time (or your supervisor thinks you have), than you have to scrape your poor results together to write a lousy manuscript. Basically you have mixed feelings, because you did everything three times with three different outcomes, but your supervisor convinced you to ‘pick the best one’ (which means, the one that fits best to the story). Besides, you find that statistical tests are overrated, so you pick one which delivers a significant p-value and ignore contradictory ones. Don’t be concerned, everybody does it that way (The mentioned meta study found a non-expected over representation of p-values just below 0.05, a threshold usually regarded as significant). I must confess, I drew a rather dark picture here, but a lot of research is done that way because the pressure to publish is high.
But this is another story and it’s certainly more entertaining to take a look at some beer statistics. Luckily, each country has a brewer’s and maltster’s guild collecting data on breweries across the nation. Even better, they submit their data to the european brewers association which collects and releases the data. Their publications are of high quality, therefore we concentrate on just a very few aspects. The questions I had in mind were: Who’s the strongest producer, who’s the strongest consumer, which countries are explicitly exporters or importers and where are the most breweries. Here are the answers (click to enlarge).
Europe by numbeRs 