Sumo Wrestlers from foreign countries

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At his coming summer Sumo tournament, three of all Yokuzunas, the wrestlers in the  highest rank, will all bel Mongolian. Some refer to this phenomena as “Kurofune”, Black steamship with Admiral Perry who demanded Tokugawa Japan to open the country.

The history of foreign-born Sumo wrestler goes back to 1960’s. And the acceptance of them reflects the change in Japanese society and international relationship.

1960’s : Foreigner=American——Hawaii over the rainbow

During WWII and after the war, Japanese government strongly regulated the ordinary Japanese people’s traveling abroad. In 1963, the business trip was deregulated, on condition that you do not take out money more than $500.

In1966, the travel in foreign countries were deregulated for everyone.

After being occupied by US Army, “Foreigner” usually meant “American”. And the travel destination “over the rainbow” was Hawaii, the nearest state of USA .

And from there came this lovable guy, Jesse, or Takamiyama in 1964. The .first Sumo wrestler from  the world outside. He was nominated to top ranking group of Sumo wrestlers
in 1968.

jesse

1968

Birth places of the wrestlers in top group then is shown in map.

Follow Jesse!

In 1985, an agreement between the governments of G5 countries to depreciated the U.S. dollar relation to the Japanese yen and German Mark by intervening in currency markets. This “Plaza Accord”  accelerated a higher exchange rate of the yen. It allowed affordable travel abroad for Japanese. It also meant for the foreigner, the money you earned in Japan valued more if you go home.

Three more guys from Hawaii followed Jesse. Two of them made the highest rank, Yokozuna.
The end of Cold War

Towards the end of 1980’s, the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union had broken away.It strongly influenced Mongolian politics, leading to the peaceful Democratic Revolution and the introduction of a multi-party system and market economy.

Mr Kaifu visted Mongolia officially in 1992, which was the first official visit by Japanese prime minister. Mongolian TV started to broadcast Sumo Tournament.

2004

And there came the descendants of Genghis Khan.

In 2004, the birth places of wrestler spread wide to the central Asia and to former Soviet Union.

More and more young boys came from Mongolia to Japan to be Sumo Wrestler.

On Japanese side, Mongolia became a romantic destination to travel.

Staying at one of their movable home ger, gazing stars above the wild steppe, watching Mongolian Sumo…It was a new experience for those who got tired of Paris and New York. From 2009 to 2010, the number of Japanese traveler to Mongolia increased 24%.

Catch the Inbound travelers!

After the end of bubble, the structure change of Japanese economy was inevitable. In 2002, the government proposed the “Visit Japan Campaign”. The number of the inbound travelers kept growing, although there was some decline in 2011, because of the earthquake.

Chinese travelers are the largest group. But when the relationship between China and Japan deteriorates, they cancel the travel seeing the communist government ‘s behavior, which causes problem to travel industry in Japan.

Halal Certification—Welcome, Muslim People!

2012

Around 2012, some of the hotels in Japan started to serve Halal food. At most of the National Universities, such as Tokyo Uni. or Kyoto Uni., they serve Halal menu at cafeteria.

In 2013, tourists to Japan reached more than 10 million. There is a sift from Chinese to Muslim from South East Asia. The movement to get Halal certification started among service industry. And just in time for this movement, Oosunaarashi joined Sumo in Japan, the first Muslim wrestler, and the first Rikishi from Africa.
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GIFGIFmap

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Background: Kevin Hu & Travis Rich built a site called GIFGIF, which aims to crowd tag animated gifs with various emotions. From GIFGIF’s website: “An animated gif is a magical thing. It contains the power to convey emotion, empathy, and context in a subtle way that text or emoticons simply can’t. GIFGIF is a project to capture that magic with quantitative methods. Our goal is to create a tool that lets people explore the world of gifs by the emotions they evoke, rather than by manually entered tags.” As we know, animated gifs are also a popular storytelling mechanism for social news and entertainment websites.

The cultural phenomenon of using animated gifs to express emotions has been the subject of numerous journalistic inquiries:

Fresh From the Internet’s Attic – NYTimes

Christina Hendricks on an Endless Loop: The Glorious GIF Renaissance – Slate.com

GIF hearts Tumblr: a fairytale for the Internet age – Wired.co.uk

Visualization project for this week: Kevin, Travis, and I built a map tool so people can explore GIFGIF’s current dataset to see which gifs are most representative of certain emotions across different countries. Out of 1.8 million votes, 1.4 million votes had IP data which links the votes to the location of the voter. GIFGIFmap can be found here.

Screen Shot 2014-04-02 at 1.03.12 AM

In a future version, we would like to show the top gifs per emotion that countries have in common with each other, and what are unique top gifs for each country (along the lines of What We Watch). However, there are limitations to the GIFGIF data set in terms of global coverage. For example, the top 21 countries account for 92% of the votes. Additionally, we excluded countries that had less than 10,000 total votes across all categories, so as to avoid making generalizations based on limited data. We chose to include the number of votes per country (per emotion) to make the data set more transparent in terms of representation.

We think the tool we are building could complement existing stories about the phenomenon of using animated gifs to communicate (stories like the ones we linked to above).

These are some potential questions that we hope journalists could explore using a map interface to the GIFGIF dataset:

1) Do people from different countries interpret the emotional content of gifs differently?

2) If there are variances in interpretation, are there clusters of countries that have more similar interpretations? Do these match up with proximity, or immigration patterns?

3) What top gifs per emotion are unique to a given country?

 

Note: GIFGIF’s data will soon be made publicly available through an API.

 

Boston high schools- by the numbers

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My Quest for Truth

It all started with a simple question: How many high schools are there in Boston?

High-schools.com lists “all public and private high schools located in Boston” and says there are 17. Greatschools.org lists 32 public and private high schools. US News says there are 32 schools just within the Boston Public School District. Wikipedia says 33. The Massachusetts Department of Education lists 42 public and private.

I compiled a list of 56.

Why the discrepancy over a seemingly basic question? Is it because

  • We can’t agree on what “high school” means?
  • We can’t agree on what “in Boston” means?

Charter schools, special education, adult education, vocational training, private schools, religious schools- there are many ways to designate what is and is not a “high school” that could explain the differences cheap air jordan.
Boston public schools, Boston city limits, Greater Boston- the discrepancy may also be caused by varying definitions of what it means for a high school to be “in Boston.”

I aim to create an authoritative central portal that lists all high schools in Boston. I will continue exploring this in future assignments (talk to me if you want to collaborate!).

Cold Calling For Data

To preempt a similar situation arising when trying to figure out how many high school students are there in Boston, this time I chose a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. I picked up the phone and began cold calling every high school on my list. I asked every school receptionist two questions:

  • How many students go to your school?
  • What makes your school special?

I chose these two questions because I thought they would be a good foundation to explore both quantitative and qualitative data, and the answers could give me potential follow-on questions if I continue focusing on Boston high schools.

Another Course to College- their Annual Report states 220 students; their receptionist told me 224.

Boston Adult Technical Academy- their Annual Report states 257 students; their receptionist told me 300.

Boston Arts Academy- their Annual Report states 420 students; their receptionist told me 400.

Boston International High School- their Annual Report states 359 students; their receptionist told me 500.

… and the list goes on. I could present more data but I’m not sure what story I want it to tell yet. Yes, I could add up all the numbers and create “the authoritative Julia guide to how many high school students there are in Boston.” Yes, I could put together another “a-ha” moment showing the discrepancies in calculating this number across organizations and websites. But I don’t want to present a repeat of other dry, going nowhere data pieces.

Telling a Story

I recently read the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die which nailed home for me the importance of telling a compelling story. With the school mapping project I am working on, I have been more focused on organizing and presenting the information and hoping others will find stories to tell, rather than having to tell the story myself. My model has been Wikipedia, which presents information in a way that is useful to the reader. Would you say that Wikipedia tells a story?

My aim has been to build a school mapping platform using data and communication tools that are informative and useful. I thought that would be enough. What I’m struggling with now is how to build a platform that tells a story, and what story do I want it to tell original new balance.

original new balance

Mapping Election discrepancies

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Kenya recently marked one year after the 2013 polls. It is common fact that the election went on peacefully though several questions remain unanswered to date. As per the constitution,  for one to be validly elected, the winner must garner more than 50 percent plus 1 of the total votes cast.

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{Need to figure a way to embed html elements on this blog!!!}

Can be accessed here

One year down the line, I have decided to look at the events before the election. Mainly the voter registration statistics. Compare these statistics against the numbers used on the election day. The 2013 election was one of the most contested on all fronts. From the use of social media, the use of cleaver PR strategies to plain political schemes which may not be easily identifiable on the surface. Take for instance, the push by member of certain areas forcing members of their communities to register.  A simple example was to the lead up to the election, bus conductors would request to see one’s voters card to be eligible to catch the bus(matatu) to their destination. This of course pushed the registration numbers in favor of certain politicians. A counter argument could be made that,  other communities that were as not hands on around voter registration have no right to complain of such tactics. One year down the line, politicians who suffered from this maneuver are asking citizens to forgo family planning in-order to increase their political base in future.  This is indeed shallow as those most likely to be born would not be eligible to vote for the next eighteen years.  Also not forgetting the fast changing political dynamic.

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DATA STORY: Climate Disasters are already happening

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What did I try to do?

I chose the two news stories that I would have been covering these last two weeks if I had been in Madrid and I though of how to communicate them with data visualization. The two stories were:

– WHO’s report  about deaths atributed to air pollution.

– UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) latest report warming that climate change will be an important threat to security, food and humankind.

My (many) DIFFICULTIES

My first difficulty was acces to data. I got a press release and a longer written report from WHO about its latest findings about air pollution consequences for health, but I didn’t have the data and I couldn’t find it online. I asked for it and they sent me data from 2004!

I tried to find air pollution and deaths information for Europe  and for Spain, and… it was not possible to find anything suitable to put into a spreadsheet.

After having not success on the air pollution I jumped into the climate change story. On a week where there are tons of literature in western media about the natural disasters that are yet to come because of global warming, I wanted to develop a data visualization story showing that we are already suffering an increase of extreme weather events that seems to have something to do with climate change.

Again, I couldn’t find the data for Europe or Spain, though this time I was lucky with the US.

NOAA has a compilation of the largest climate disasters occurred in the US since 1980. Data was on PDF format and although I tried different programs, I couldn’t converted it into an excel spreadsheet… So, I did a spreadsheet by myself with the data from the last 3 years, which took me about 4 hours.

Next step was mapping the data. I tried ArcGIS Online, Google Fusion Tables and Tilemill and I didn’t success with any of them because after many hours I got to the conclusion that the data collected didn’t really match with the idea of visualizacion that I had. I learned that I should have collected and organized the data in a different way to get the result I wanted; and that I should have asked for help to somebody who knows how to code, but when I figured this out it was too late.

Since I wanted to show something for the class tomorrow, I decided to use some of my data with a tool I wanted to learn about: Timeline.

The result

So, here are the main climate disasters occurred in the US in 2013, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center

 

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Finding data on the Syrian conflict

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Finding credible data on the conflict in Syria has been a difficult endeavour for both journalists and policy-makers. One approach many have been finding useful is the use of crowdsourced maps. Syria Tracker and the Women Under Siege Syria chapter are the most noteworthy crowdsourcing initiatives that aim at mapping the conflict in Syria with the help of local volunteers.

Syria Tracker has considerable geospatial data on the number of civilian deaths, recorded by volunteers, and “resulting from the Assad regime” since March 2011. Although this dataset must be taken with a grain of salt, as it only represents the work of activists working again the government, it gives detailed accounts of the causes of deaths (either through air strike, gun shot, bomb or the use of chemical weapons) and the victim’s identity (gender and age).

Women Under Siege monitors acts of sexual violence which are reportedly committed against men and women. Open Street Map is another crowdsourcing initiative, on a global scale, which geospatial experts contribute to for the sake of good mapping. In Syria, Open Street Map offers comprehensive maps on the country’s main roads, natural resources and facilities location (such as hospitals and schools).

By translating this geospatial data into a GIS (geographic information system) software (known as ARC Map), one can visualize if there is a correlation between different aspects of the conflict.

The following map, for example, shows the location of refugee camps surrounding the Syrian borders, the major border crossings into the country and the main IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps within the country.  All camps are obviously close to transit points and to major roads.

Refugee Camps and border

The next map shows the location of all of the IDP camps and the location of the main waterways (rivers and lakes) within Syria. This is important because it shows that the livelihoods of the internally displaced is closely linked to access to water (as you can see most camps are situated near a waterway).

IDP Camps and Water.j

In the end, the availability of geospatial data on conflict areas, (and in this case on Syria), is bountiful. However, this type of data is not available to the general public. I was able to acquire all of the data above for free but one must acquire technical skills to be able to make sense of the data. GIS is one way, among many others, to spatially visualize data.