Silk Insights

Silk is a data analysis, publishing, and visualization platform. We cover politics, tech, economy, culture. You can browse a Silk to explore data and create interactive charts and maps. www.silk.co

[silkinsights]

Mapping the Refugee Crisis in 8 Points

Follow more updates here.

[silkinsights]

“Pay for professional women’s soccer players is at best paltry and at worst outright shameful compared to those of their male counterparts.”

The Gender Gap in Sports

[silkinsights]

The Gender Gap in Sports

“Pay for professional women’s soccer players is at best paltry and at worst outright shameful compared to those of their male counterparts.” 

[silkinsights]

5 Ways The Movie Industry Still Fails Women

[silkinsights]

What does putting your room on Airbnb do to your income? 

[mapsontheweb]

63 of 142 nations have had a female head of government or state at some point in the 50 years.

[silkinsights]

In the cricket world cup, the men’s team receives $3.8 million and the women’s team receives $73,000

Gender Pay Gap in Sports

[silkinsights]

India and Turkey: Restricting Free Speech Through Facebook and Social Media

In 2013, Facebook started publishing data on the amount of content it restricted in different countries. Between July 2013 and December 2014, India and Turkey alone were responsible for 90% of the almost 26,000 pieces of restricted content.

[forbes]

The Most Popular First Jobs For Recent College Grads

Out of the top 650 schools on FORBES’ Top Colleges list, 36% of the schools’ recent graduates identified themselves as part of the education sector.

[pewresearch]

The most and least racially diverse U.S. religious groups

Although U.S. Jews (90% white) and Hindus (91% Asian) are not very diverse, especially compared with Americans overall, the five least diverse groups in the index are all Protestant denominations.

[silkinsights]

In today's latest celebrity feud, Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj engage in a Twitter exchange after a VMA snub, propelling Twitter into conversations around race and gender. Swift’s Twitter account ranks as the fourth most popular one with 60.8 million followers, while Minaj lags behind with 19.8 million.

What does it take to be a Twitter Rockstar? 

We looked, and found out.

[silkapp]

Announcing Silk Summer Webinars: First up, data extraction with Import.io

We are excited to announce the launch of Silk.co Webinars. For the first batch we are doing a three part series.

What: There are great stories buried in the large amount of data that gets published on the web every day. In this three-part Silk.co webinar series, we’ll learn how to:

Find and extract data

Clean the dataset

Analyze and visualize the data

The end result will be a provocative data journalism story, published on the free data publishing platform Silk.

Part 1 - Finding and extracting data: Our first guest will be Alex Gimson from data extraction company Import.io. Alex has used Import.io to help hundreds of organizations (including Oxfam, The Guardian, and others)) extract relevant data from public websites such as AirBnB, Zillow and many others.

Cost: Free. Both Silk and Import.io are free tools.

Sign up: Please sign up here. You will get an invitation by email for every webinar, and a recap with links to the webinars on Youtube.

Who should attend: Data journalists, market researchers, spreadsheet users, and anyone else who has looked at data on a website and thought there was a story trapped in there somewhere.

When: The first session, on finding and extracting data, will be on July 22nd, 12-1 pm EDT / 9-10am PDT.

Please also invite friends and colleagues because they might learn useful skills from this webinar.

See you soon,

Jurian from Silk.co

[silkinsights]

Prominent voices in tech journalism are criticizing the global startup community for building software products and services that cater to the 1 percent or have zero societal value. They claim that curated shopping services are not really revolutionary; that food delivery services aren’t changing the world; and that ridesharing is nice but not exactly earth-shattering. And, clearly, building ways to sell more ads adds nothing to the global karmic bottom line. However, in my world, I see numerous critical tools and services coming from startups that have world-changing potential. These tools and services help mere mortals wrangle data and use it to greater effect. Data is power. Those who can wield data effectively or collect data where previously it was unavailable can fight powerful monied adversaries and force social change. We call it the “data revolution.” It’s a real thing and it will leave a tremendous positive legacy for the world.

Salar Al Khafaji, Data, Startups And Doing Things That Matter

[silkinsights]

The gender ratio of women and men Film School graduates is quite balanced. However women end up being significantly underrepresented in the industry. For example, no women has ever won an Academy Award for Cinematography. And Kathryn Bigelow has been the only female director to win an Oscar. Not a surprise, given that there have ever been only 4 women nominated for Best Director... against 425 men!

Women Behind the Camera: The Gender Gap in TV Series

[silkinsights]

[silkinsights]

Billionaire Cities

New York City, Moscow and Hong Kong clearly lead the pack, all with over 60 billionaires living in their city limits.

Dallas and Paris are by far the smaller cities, and their rate of billionaires (number of billionaires per 1,000,000 citizens) is considerably higher.

[npr]

Over the last decade, economic growth lifted almost a billion people around the world out of extreme poverty. Unfortunately, it didn’t lift them very far.

A rising economic tide has been concentrated in just a few regions of the world, and it’s failed to raise many people into the middle class.

By U.S. standards, most of the world remains terribly poor.

“If we look at the income distribution of the world population, the vast majority is living [on] $2 to $4 per day,” says Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research and economist at the Pew Research Center. Kochhar is one of the authors of the new report“A Global Middle Class is More Promise than Reality.”

The study looks at changes in economic status around the world between 2001 and 2011. How many people in impoverished Burundi, for instance, were considered “low income” in 2001 versus a decade earlier? How many people in booming Uruguay rose to the “upper-middle income” category?

And while there’s been a lot of improvement at the very bottom of the economic ladder recently, Kochhar and his colleagues find that only 13 percent of the world’s population is now “middle class.”

Who’s Still Poor? Who’s Made It To Middle Income? Pew Has New Data

[huffpost]

Here’s How Much $100 Is Worth In Each State