socks-studio

Here’s how the territory of Palestine has shrinked and borders have fragmented from 1917 to present day. A cartographic essay on GOOD.
Thanks, Ethel, as usual.

Click the first image for a higher resolution:

Italian online newspaper Il Post publishes a report by a group of four Austrian researchers from Wien University, about an innovative statistical method to detect electoral frauds:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting:
Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen’s vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies certain statistical consequences for the polling results which can be used to identify election irregularities. Using a suitable data collapse, we find that vote distributions of elections with alleged fraud show a kurtosis of hundred times more than normal elections. As an example we show that reported irregularities in the 2011 Duma election are indeed well explained by systematic ballot stuffing and develop a parametric model quantifying to which extent fraudulent mechanisms are present. We show that if specific statistical properties are present in an election, the results do not represent the will of the people. We formulate a parametric test detecting these statistical properties in election results. For demonstration the model is also applied to election outcomes of several other countries.

Crossing the percentage of voters with the percentage of winning party’s voters, and analyzing the number of districts by color, Peter Klimek, Yuri Yegorov, Rudolf Hanel e Stefan Thurner traced a sort of poll’s fingerprint, and put into evidence suspect cases and irregularities.

Districts usually cluster around a given turnout and voting level. In Uganda and Russia these clusters are ’smeared out’ to the upper right region of the plots, reaching a second peak at a 100% turnout and a 100% of votes (red circles).

While the report is not of easy lecture if you’re not really into statistics, it shows an interesting use of science to uncover one of the most efficient yet hidden display of tyrannical power.

Read the full text pdf on arxiv.org.

Via: Il Post

“A taxonomy of transition“, (2009) by radical cartographer Bill Rankin is a visual essay on how racial boundaries mark the neighborhoods of a city like Chicago, “where the delimitation of (…) official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology.”

This work uses dot mapping to show populations (Red/Purple is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people), hence describing three kinds of urban transitions: stark and precise boundaries, transitions and gradients, gaps.

This project was originally published as an essay in the Spring 2010 issue of Perspecta, the journal of the Yale School of Architecture.

In 2011 it won the MiniMax mapping contest at the “Moving Maps” cartographic biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Astounded by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago‘s racial and ethnic divides (above), Eric Fisher tried the same kind of mapping on 40 American cities. See here his “Race and Ethnicity” photoset, particularly because high definition images allow an for a better vision of the transitions.

Washingron D.C.: a strong separation between East and West;

Detroit: 8 mile beltway, providing a boundary for Black and White populations;

San Francisco Bay: white predominance over Northern side of the city, while relatively better integration on other sectors of the Bay;

New York: extreme racial segregation, increased by massive density. Possible cross-cultural ferment on boundaries;







LA: low density allows for blending neighborhoods;

San Antonio: even integration between white and hispanic populations.

Via: FastCo Design

In fact, the Judd exhibition poster from the previous article is part of a collection of 50 art posters from the Modern Art Oxford Callery.

Selected by artists Simon & Tom Bloor as a celebration of the 50 years of the institution, each of the 50 posters is coupled with contextual stories you can find on the site, clicking on the posters.

More infos on mao5050.com/
Here’s this fantastic series:

“The intention of the film “Dynamic of the Metropolis” is not to teach, nor to moralise, nor to tell a story; its effect is meant to be visual, purely visual.
The elements of the visual have not in this film an absolute logical connection with one another; their photographic, visual relationships, nevertheless, make them knit together into a vital association of events in space and time and bring the viewer actively into the dynamic of the city”
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Read full text on the pdf of the 1969 english edition.

Read more: Transfiguring the Urban Gray, László Moholy-Nagy’s Film Scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’ by Edward Dimendberg.

Via: Stefano Mirti on fb and Chaudron