The Globe and Mail’s Awful Canadian Unemployment Map
I’ve posted a number of maps showing U.S. unemployment rates, so I perked up when I saw that The Globe and Mail had an interactive unemployment map for Canada. Unfortunately, it’s terrible: it only shows the change in the unemployment rate from July to August; provinces are points rather than areas; the interactivity is limited to mouseovers; the colours are backward (red for dropping unemployment, green for growing, when you’d normally expect green to be good and red to be bad) and show change rather than level — a low unemployment rate that goes up a tenth of a point would be shown no differently than a high unemployment rate that goes up a full point. And then there’s the comma between the tens and the ones. Have that cartographer flogged immediately.
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I just read your post today and clicked over to the Globe and Mail’s website. They reversed the colors! Now red is bad. The other disappointing aspects of the map remain.
September 25, 2009 at 5:37 PM