SubscribeThe New Poor - Internet Penetration Rates by Country
Yesterday is Blog Action day and tons of bloggers posted about single topic - poverty. It is a topic very close to my heart for various reasons. It is a very sad thing not to have food or shelter or healthy living conditions. But man has thrived in all those situations just because he learned how to become better. In my opinion lack of knowledge is much more serious than lack of food. That is one reason why even the poorest parents in the world would love to see their kids going to school, so that they can learn and become better. I want to sensitize my readers about this issue: the new poor - people without information.. Internet penetration can be considered as one parameter to measure information hunger in the world. So I spent sometime yesterday gathering the data about this and created a heat map.
Mapping Internet Penetration Rates in World Countries
I took the data about internet penetration from Internet World Stats and used this in the World heat map excel that my friend Robert (of Excel Dashboards fame) once shared with me to create a map like this:
Download the excel file with the map of world internet penetration rates
Darker countries have less internet penetration. Sadly this map correlates highly with a world poverty map. I guess attacking the information access issues can eventually solve the poverty.
Also checkout Nathan’s visualization on poverty rates in US
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Chandoo, interesting post, as always. Dedicated reader here. One thing though: I thought that Scandinavia looked somewhat funny and had a closer look. The colour range is so wide that the countries with the highest internet penetration are assigned such a light colour that they don’t show on the map, for example Norway and the Netherlands are invisible. (Not that most Americans would notice )
A few les grades with the lightest colour being distinguishable from white would be better.
Keep up the good work
Teylyn
@teyln .. thanks. When I first prepared the countries with higher penetration rates were dark and thus drawing focus. Since I wanted to shift the focus to the ones with lower penetration rates I shifted the RGB colors by subtracting them from 255. I guess few countries have managed to get the 255,255,255 value.
Btw, if you have downloaded the excel, you can adjust the color grade from the control sheet, just set a value closer to 5 to see darker shades..
teylyn, Chandoo,
as Chandoo pointed, he shifted the RGB colors ‘upside down’ to make it a ‘the darker the less’ heat map.
Because of that, the mapping of values to colors ends at 0 with an RGB of (255,255,255), i.e. a white fill color.
Therefore the countries with the highest penetration (Netherlands and Norway, both 88%) get assigned a white fill color and are invisible. Increasing the color grade (control!D6) will not help, because this cell only controls the increase of the steps, starting with the last one.
But you can easily change the last value of the steps (control!D58) from 0 to let’s say 15 or 20. This will bring Norway and Netherlands back home to earth …
Teylyn, Chandoo,
a correction: it should be control!C58 in the last paragraph of my recent comment. Sorry…
@Robert … thanks for suggesting how to change the whites to something slightly dark.
Mate nice display with World map.
Anybody knows how to include additional countries into the map?
I realized Taiwan wasn’t included and tried to include it. However how do you go about drawing the countries in the map and link it with the cell?
I’ve tried reading from http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/charts/0301-dashboard-conditional%20shape%20colors.htm , however it seems that robert desined the map slightly differently.
I was wondering if anyone could help me. I want to add Taiwan (which is missing) into the map.
How do I go about doing it?
Which autoshape should I use to draw the country and what is the method to link the shape to auto-update when the redraw button is pressed?
This might be a duplicate comment (first one was not accepted). If so, I am sorry…
Jiaming,
please send me an email (use the email-link on my blog clearlyandsimply.com) and I will send you a version including Taiwan.