Russia Fires: Why You Can’t Trust the Numbers

As you must have read, scorching weather has ignited peat fires across 35 regions in Russia. At its height last week, smog produced from the raging fires meant visibilty in Moscow was just 300 metres. The fire emergency status has been cancelled in three regions but the scale of the disaster can be guaged somewhat from this Goolge Earth [...]

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Numerical information is becoming more and more important in news reporting. This is not only due to interactive web abilities (I’ll write another post on this) but because big news is news of scale. For instance, the floods in Pakistan are now being put into context with figures. The number of people suffering from the [...]