Crime and employment - Color as a trend

I was playing around with Qlik Cloud again. I grabbed some data from the Irish Central Statistics Office on employment statistics in Ireland and reported crime - both over a period from Q1 2003 up to, and including, Q1 2015.

It was easy enough to upload the data to the cloud and then load it into the application. A scatter chart seemed to be a good choice to see if there is any correlation between the two sets of data:

My first impression of the correlation is that there doesn't appear to be one. Perhaps there is a small negative correlation that crime incidents will reduce as unemployment increases (which is not what I would have thought before looking at the data).

The second thing that I thought about was that I couldn't quickly see the trend of the data in this chart. Now, I know that a line chart would be more useful for seeing any trend, but I felt that, with each dot on the scatter representing a calendar quarter, it would be useful to discern the trend in this chart. I thought that it might be useful to use color to achieve this.

I had a field called QuarterNumber, which is a 5 digit number representing the four digit year and the quarter number from 1 to 4. I created this color expression:

  ColorMix1(
    (QuarterNumber-Min(Total QuarterNumber))/
    (Max(Total QuarterNumber)-Min(Total QuarterNumber)),
    LightGray(),
    LightBlue()
  )

This results in a chart in which it is very easy to see where in time a point exists. This, I believe, adds more clarity to the chart:



As to the analysis, it appears that the negative correlation is true for many crimes, and that shows up in the overall figure. However, crimes that people are quite concerned about - theft, burglary and robbery - show a different correlation:

With those three types selected, there is a distinct positive correlation.

The good news for the Irish is that the highest quarter - Q4 of 2014 - was only 29,088 of such incidents. This is a very low percentage and Ireland is actually one of the safest countries in the world to live.

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Stephen Redmond is a Data Visualization professional. He is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
 

Low down on Qlik Cloud 2.0

Qlik Cloud was launched along with Qlik Sense 1.0 at the end of last year. It allowed users of Qlik Sense Desktop to upload a document to the cloud and then share that application with other users. There were limitations. For example, the number of users that you could share with was limited to 3. Also, once they were up there, the applications could not be edited.

With the launch of Qlik Sense 2.0, we were promised new functionality, and this appears to have been made available in the last couple of days.

Now, as well as uploading applications that have been created from Qlik Sense Desktop, we can also upload files and create brand new applications directly on the service. Not only that, but we can make use of Qlik's new DataMarket to bring in curated data sources such as demographics, currencies and weather.

The number of users that we can share applications with has been increased to 5. But we have a brand new feature in that we can choose to share individual charts from these applications on our blogs and other media - like this:



Creating new applications is very straightforward. First, we need to provide some data (Excel, CSV, etc.):

We can now start to create new applications in our personal cloud:

When we create the application, we can choose to load in the data that we have uploaded:

And Qlik will parse it out for us:

Or we can choose to get data from the Data Market:

We can bring in multiple data sources and Qlik provides a profiler to suggest the correct data links.

Once we have loaded the data successfully, we can start creating content with the drag/drop interfaces:

When we have created a chart, there is a right-click (or tap-and-hold) option to share it. We can get a link that can be used to share via email, social media, etc., or an embed link to share via blogs and other web pages (as I have used above):

All very, very easy!

Part of the success of Tableau Software is that they have had Tableau Public, where users can create content and share it for free. Only time will tell whether the Qlik Cloud solution will challenge that, but not having to have an installed Windows application will certainly be interesting for many people.

So, that is the down-low on Qlik Cloud - don't keep it on the low down. Time for you to go and play and start creating data applications in the cloud!

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Stephen Redmond is a Data Visualization professional. He is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook
 

Invisible servants

The King woke in the morning and stretched. The sun streamed through the opened curtains.

He eased out of bed straight into his waiting slippers and dressing gown.

He made his way into his bathroom and eased himself into the bath - which was at just the right temperature for him.

After he dried off, using perfectly warmed towels, he made his way to his dressing room to don his pressed trousers and freshly ironed shirt.

He wandered down to the breakfast room to sit down in front of the exact breakfast that he wanted. Laid beside his breakfast plate was the days letters. Of course, only the ones of interest to him were there, there was no junk.

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A lovely story, but what is missing? Of course, it is the servants. The servant who opened the curtains at the right time. The servant who laid out the slippers and dressing gown. The servant who prepared the bath at exactly the right temperature.

What on earth has this got to do with data visualization???

It has everything to do with data visualization! Your data visualization needs to be the servants. Your users are the King. The servants should present the right data in the right way so that the King doesn't even realize that the servants are there!

Remember your ink-to-data ratio and let the data dominate.

Let your servants fade into the background and crown your users.

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Stephen Redmond is a Data Visualization professional. He is author of Mastering QlikView, QlikView Server and Publisher and the QlikView for Developer's Cookbook