Two items

Firstly, prompted by something, I think from Microsoft News, about how North Korea was managing to make a living in its heavily sanctioned world, I came across the graphic above in Wikipedia, that is to say in towards the end of reference 1, with the caption 'A proportional representation of North Korean exports'. A graphic which looked to me to be a bad example of an interesting technique for visualisation. A few clicks into Bing and I learn that the technique in question is called treemapping and appears to have spawned a regular industry of data scientists writing algorithms and telling us how to do it. While Microsoft have included a fairly elementary gadget in Excel. I found reference 2 helpful.

The idea seems to be that you have three degrees of freedom. The most important variable is carried by the size of the rectangle. The next most important is carried by the colour of the rectangle. And then one has position. Clever grouping is good. And if one is on a computer screen you can also have pop-ups: hover over a rectangle and you get more.

We are told that the figure above, about the movements of stocks and shares, is popular and successful in that it manages to get over a lot of information without overwhelming the viewer, with an animated version to be found at reference 3. The only catch is that I am not quite sure what the size of the rectangles and the colour of the rectangles represent. Market capitalisation and movement of share price?

So a potentially powerful technique, but one which seems to come without established conventions for mapping the tree one starts with onto a screen shaped graphic. A technique which is widely used, but with rather mixed results. A victory of technique over data? I associate to the way that all kinds of academics and journalists deploy fancy statistical tools in their papers, not necessarily much help to the lay reader.

[The Rough offshore gas storage facility, partially reopened with great fanfare last October after its 2017 closure by owner Centrica, has been steadily withdrawing gas this year © Simon Price/Centrica/Firstpix]

Secondly, I read in the Financial Times this morning about how our government appears to be clinging to its fantasy that market forces, pure and simple, are the answer to all the world's problems. In this case, ensuring that the UK has a reasonable amount of gas in storage come next winter. Compared with continental Europe we don't seem to have much storage, preferring to rely on there always being enough gas coming to market - from where I associate to Northern Rock building a business model on there always being enough cheap money coming to market. No need to make long-term provision. In the case of gas, this seems to me to be reckless. It is all very well for Centrica to make a commercial judgement about whether it wants to bet a few billion pounds on bringing the Rough gas storage facility back online - but I would much prefer our government to get in there and act. In much the same way that I would much prefer if it ramped up the number of beds in our hospitals and places in our care homes in slow time, rather than relying on their greedy and sometimes incompetent friends to do the necessary in quick time. For which see reference 5.

PS 1: and it remains a complete mystery to me why it is better to have a whole lot of companies buying gas on the open market and selling it onto the grid for us consumers to use. Some of which go bust when the going gets rough. Is it really a good idea to have our gas supply at the mercy of commodity speculators? What happens when we get outbid by Singapore, Vietnam or wherever? Would it not be a better idea to concentrate gas purchase and supply into a single quasi-government entity empowered to take a long view - rather than trying to make a fast buck out of the shenanigans of the spot market?

PS 2: does the same argument run, for example, with the supply of wheat or the supply of chromium? I suppose the answer is that it all depends. Both things are essential, but we probably have a fair amount of storage capacity for both, and any problems are not going to hit the man-in-the-street as quickly as turning off the gas taps. But if there were serious problems, then yes, the government should step up, possibly stepping back again when the problems subsided. From where I associate to government attempts to shore up supplies of rock salt for application to our roads a few winters ago. From what I can recall, that degenerated into near farce.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_North_Korea.

Reference 2: Tree Visualization with Tree-Maps: 2-d Space-Filling Approach - Ben Shneiderman - 1992.

Reference 3: https://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec_all&st=w52.

Reference 4: UK still ducking the issue on gas storage: Discussions over the full reopening of Centrica’s Rough facility appear to have stalled - Helen Thomas, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/chums.html.

Reference 6: https://www.simonpricephotographer.com/. There seem to be a number of photographers of this name. Not at all sure that this is the right one.