Juan Convers

This morning I was reading the Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 published by transparency international (transparency.org). This organization fights for a a world in which government, business, civil society and the daily lives of people are free of corruption and publishes this report that quantifies perceptions of corruption in the public sector and normalizes the data from multiple countries in an index from 0 (the most corrupt) to 100 (the least corrupt).

I compiled a couple of maps from their data sources.

One of the first conclusions from this report is that the scandinavian countries have the highest scores in the Corruption Perception Index (Least corrupted countries) as it can be observed in the following European map:

In South America, Chile and Uruguay have the highest scores, while Venezuela has the lowest.

Yesterday I was reading the news about the Apple: On Tuesday they reported the financial results of their fiscal first quarter. One of the conclusions from this event is that even if they had records on profits, on the other hand the iPhone sales rose less than 1 percent from a year earlier.

I was checking the Mobile & Table operating systems market share data published by netmarketshare.net and this trend downwards is clear:

I never owned an iPhone. I really like the quality of the hardware and software produced by this company (In fact I'm writing this post on a macbook air), but I don't like the closed restricted ecosystem associated to their business model. It's refreshing to see so many different android devices on the market.

One of the constant topics in the news are the mass shootings in the United States and the debates related to gun control, the 2nd amendment of their constitution and the almost impossible effort to regulate this market. This is particularly true now that they have presidential elections at the end of this year.

So how does it look the gun ownership in this country compared to the rest of the world (gun ownership per 100 habitants):

I guessed the USA had the highest gun ownership rate and that turned out to be true, but I never realised how high it was. It seems crazy to me that a country has more firearms than habitants!. The Washington Post has an interesting article where they discuss this issue.

The central office of statistics in Ireland website cso.ie has some interesting data tables that can downloaded, so yesterday I decided to pull out the unemployment data and plot it.

I was curious because when I arrived to the country the economy was doing really good, but I saw the changes during the crisis of 08. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened in the last years. Even if the unemployment level hasn't reached yet the numbers of 2005, I think the trend is definitively positive.

In this new year one my resolutions was to to undust my social accounts and to update them on a regular basis.

I also thought it would be interesting to use my personal website to keep a blog with the most interesting updates I post on those social profiles or to write about anything that comes to my mind. Nevertheless I didn't want to spend a lot of time setting up yet another blog using wordpress or something similar. It was an interesting experience when I did it for my career break but this time around I wanted a simpler solution.

Based on my recent experience writing back and forth to Google Spreadsheets I decided to use this product as super simple CMS. Through this approach I can write the posts on the columns and rows interface and include the html tags I need such as this bold or this italic and add links to the different media elements that I might want to include in the posts

Once I'm happy with any particular post, I can export those contents as a JSON file that I can parse and display on the existing application. On the image at the right you can see how my CMS looks like :). I basically used the request node module to get the JSON string and then parse it on my application:

What I like about this approach is that I can iterate over the JSON object returned by the Google Spreadsheets and get each one of the values I'm interested in and then I can push them to my local JSON object.

When I'm rendering the data on the frontend side I can access those fields quite easily. I will probably later on write a detailed post on how the process works but I'm happy with the results for now.

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