The Map Room

I’ve posted a number of maps showing U.S. unemployment rates, so I perked up when I saw that The Globe and Mail had an interactive unemployment map for Canada. Unfortunately, it’s terrible: it only shows the change in the unemployment rate from July to August; provinces are points rather than areas; the interactivity is limited to mouseovers; the colours are backward (red for dropping unemployment, green for growing, when you’d normally expect green to be good and red to be bad) and show change rather than level — a low unemployment rate that goes up a tenth of a point would be shown no differently than a high unemployment rate that goes up a full point. And then there’s the comma between the tens and the ones. Have that cartographer flogged immediately.