Ja, det er ikke let. Eller. Det er utroligt let.

Som hvid, cis-kønnet, hetero-præsenterende, midaldrende, akademikermand i arbejde fra den vestlige verden, er jeg utroligt priviligeret. Helt vildt priviligeret. Lønmæssigt er jeg blandt de 0.1% bedst stillede i verden. Og det er jeg selvom jeg er statsansat.

På den anden side, er det ikke specielt let. Som hvid, cis-kønnet midaldrende mand, er jeg nemlig også ansvarlig for alt dårligt i verden. Fattigdom i Afrika? Det skyldes at britene udnyttede de stakkels afro-amerikanere som slaver. Og briterne var hvide cis-kønnede, midaldrende mænd, og derfor er jeg medansvarlig for en slavehandel der fandt sted for 300 år siden. Den amerikanske præsident taler grimt om mexicanere. Og han er hvid og cis-kønnet. Det er jeg også. Og derfor er jeg, selvom jeg er dansk statsborger, og har tilbragt sammenlagt lidt under 2 måneder i USA, medskyldig.

Og kvinder! De er undertrykt. Sygeplejersker får ikke lige så meget i løn som ingeniører. Og ingeniører er mænd, mens sygeplejersker er kvinder. Og det er kvindeundertrykkende. Det er også kvinder der står for det meste af husarbejdet. Og eftersom jeg er mand, er det noget jeg er ansvarlig for. Også selvom det ikke er mig der har valgt at blive sygeplejerske. Og selvom det er mig der står for rengøring, oprydning og madlavning herhjemme (fair nok, jeg er gift med en mand. Det vil altid være en mand der står for det praktiske her i lejligheden).

Og det er selvfølgelig bare klynk. Det er et udtryk for en skrøbelig maskulinitet at man som mand gør opmærksom på at det måske ikke er ens skyld at en kvinde har valgt at læse nordisk filologi, og nu får mindre i løn end en mandlig forsikringsaktuar. Og hvis ikke det er udtryk for en skrøbelig maskulinitet, så er den formentlig toksisk. Fordi det at være mand er noget giftigt noget, der ødelægger ting. Man skal ikke som mand klynke over den slags ting. Det skal man tage som en mand. Nemlig. Og samtidig skal man være i kontakt med sine følelser og sådan noget. Men altså ikke på en måde hvor man kommer til at gøre opmærksom på at det egentlig sårer en at blive holdt ansvarlig for andres ulykke. Når man nu faktisk ikke har noget som helst med den at gøre.

Det kan også være lidt belastende at få at vide at samfundet lissom er indrettet til fordel for mænd. Specielt hvis man kommer til at bemærke, at der er tre steder i lovgivningen hvor der gøres forskel på mænd og kvinder. Mænd har værnepligt. Det vil sige at de har pligt til at lade sig slå ihjel for landets forsvar. Kvinder har ret. Hvis de beslutter sig for at de alligevel ikke har lyst, tager de bare hjem. Hvis man som mand nægter, bliver man hentet af politiet. Så er der sociallovgivningen. Kommunerne er forpligtet til at etablere tilbud til udsatte kvinder. Er du udsat mand, må du håbe at kommunen har en ledig bænk du kan sove på. Og endelig har du som mand, skulle du blive far, ret til mindre barsel end barnets mor.

Og skulle du gøre opmærksom på den slags? Så er du privilegieblind. Du er toxisk. Du klynker. Og dine oplevelser er pr. definition irrelevante.

Så. Rant delvist over. Man bør ikke blive overrasket hvis der er mænd der melder sig ud af det show. Langt hen ad vejen orker jeg ikke kønsdebatter. Mine oplevelser er fra start dømt ude. Fordi jeg er mand.

Not that advanced, but I wanted to play around a bit with plotting the raw data from Openstreetmap.

We’re going to Florence this fall. It’s been five years since we last visited the fair city, that has played such an important role in western history.

Openstreetmaps is, as the name implies, open.

I’m going to need some libraries

#library(OpenStreetMap)
library(osmar)
library(ggplot2)
library(broom)
library(geosphere)
library(dplyr)

osmar provides functions to interact with Openstreetmap. ggplot2 is used for the plots, broom for making some objects tidy and dplyr for manipulating data.

Getting the raw data, requires me to define a boundary box, encompassing the part of Florence I would like to work with. Looking at https://www.openstreetmap.org/export#map=13/43.7715/11.2717, I choose these coordinates:

top <- 43.7770
bottom <- 43.7642
left <- 11.2443
right <- 11.2661

After that, I can define the bounding box, tell the osmar functions at what URL we can find the relevant API (this is just the default). And then I can retrieve the data via get_osm(). I immediately save it to disc. This takes some time to download, and there is no reason to do that more than once.

box <- corner_bbox(left, bottom, right, top)
src <- osmsource_api(url = "https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/")
florence <- get_osm(box, source=src)
saveRDS(florence, "florence.rda")

Lets begin by making a quick plot:

plot(florence, xlim=c(left,right),ylim=c(bottom,top) )

Note that what we get a plot of, is, among other things, of all lines that are partly in the box. If a line extends beyond the box, we get it as well.

Looking at the data:

summary(florence$ways)

## osmar$ways object
## 6707 ways, 9689 tags, 59052 refs 
## 
## ..$attrs data.frame: 
##     id, visible, timestamp, version, changeset, user, uid 
## ..$tags data.frame: 
##     id, k, v 
## ..$refs data.frame: 
##     id, ref 
##  
## Key-Value contingency table:
##         Key         Value Freq
## 1  building           yes 4157
## 2    oneway           yes  456
## 3   highway    pedestrian  335
## 4   highway   residential  317
## 5   bicycle           yes  316
## 6       psv           yes  122
## 7   highway  unclassified  108
## 8   highway       footway  101
## 9   barrier          wall   98
## 10  surface paving_stones   87

I would like to plot the roads and buildings. For some reason there are a lot of highways, of a kind I would probably not call highways.

Anyway, lets make a list of tags. tags() finds the elements that have a key in the tag_list, way finds the lines that are represented by these elements, and find, finds the ID of the objects in “florence” matching this.
find_down() finds all the elements related to these id’s. And finally we take the subset of the large florence data-set, which have id’s matching the id’s we have in from before.

tag_list <- c("highway", "bicycle", "oneway", "building")
dat <- find(florence, way(tags(k %in% tag_list)))
dat <- find_down(florence, way(dat))
dat <- subset(florence, ids = dat)

Now, in a couple of lines, I’m gonna tidy the data. That removes the information of the type of line. As I would like to be able to color highways differently from buildings, I need to keep the information.
Saving the key-part of the tags, and the id:

types <- data.frame(dat$ways$tags$k, dat$ways$tags$id)
names(types) <- c("type", "id")

This gives me all the key-parts of all the tags. And I’m only interested in a subset of them:

types <- types %>% 
  filter(type %in% tag_list)

types$id <- as.character(types$id)

Next as_sp() converts the osmar object to a spatial object (just taking the lines):

dat <- as_sp(dat, "lines")

tidy (from the library broom), converts it to a tidy tibble

dat <- tidy(dat)

That tibble is missing the types – those are added.

new_df <- left_join(dat, types, by="id")

And now we can plot:

new_df %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x=long, y=lat, group=group)) +
  geom_path(aes(color=type)) +
  scale_color_brewer() +
    xlim(left,right) +
  ylim(bottom,top) +
  theme_void() +
theme(legend.position="none")

Nice.

Whats next? Someting like what is on this page: https://github.com/ropensci/osmplotr

Project Euler 187. Semiprimes

I had to look it up. Semiprimes are numbers that are the product of two prime numbers. And only two, although they may be equal.

There are ten of them below 30: 4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 25 and 26.

16 is not. The only primefactor is 2, but it occurs four times.

How many of these semiprimes are there below 10^8?

That should be pretty straightforward: Generate all primes below 10^8, make all the multiplications, and count how many uniqe numbers there are below n, where n=10^8.

One problem:

n <- 10**8
numbers <- primes(n)
length(numbers)

## [1] 5761455

That is a lot of numbers to multiply.

A trick: 2 times all the primes below n/2 will give all the semiprimes that have 2 as one of the primefactors (smaller than n).

3 times all the primes below n/3 will in the same way give all the semiprimes, that have 3 as one of the primefactors.

If I can figure out how many primes there are below n/2, I get the number of semiprimes that has 2 as one of the two primefactors. The same for the number of primes below n/3. If continue that to \(\sqrt(n)\), and add them all together, I should get the total number of semiprimes below n.

One issue though. The first prime below n/2 that I multiply by 2, is 3. And the first prime below n/3 that I multiply by 3 is 2. Both giving 6. I need to figure out how to only count 6 one time.

I just generated all the primes below n. The number of primes below n/2 is:

length(numbers[numbers<n/2])

## [1] 3001134

And the number of primes below n/3 is:

length(numbers[numbers<n/3])

## [1] 2050943

I do want to multiply 3 by 3. But I need to exclude 2.

length(numbers[numbers<n/3 & numbers>=3])

## [1] 2050942

Qap’la! One less prime.

I just need to do it for all of them.

n_semi_primes <- function(x){
  counter <- 0
  for(i in numbers[numbers<=sqrt(x)]){
    counter <- counter + length(numbers[numbers<x/i & numbers>=i])
  }
  return(counter)
}

I’m writing this as a function, taking a limit x. A counter is set to 0. And for all primes i less than \(\sqrt(n)\), I add the number of primes between i and < x/i.

I can test it on the example given:

n_semi_primes(30)

## [1] 10

That was the number of semiprimes below 30. And then it is just a question of running it on 10^8:

answer <- n_semi_primes(10**8)

Euler problem 62

The cube, 41063625 (345^3), can be permuted to produce two other cubes: 56623104 (384³⁾ and 66430125 (405^3). In fact, 41063625 is the smallest cube which has exactly three permutations of its digits which are also cube.

Find the smallest cube for which exactly five permutations of its digits are cube.

Alright. I need to find five cubes, that are permutations of the same digits.

How to check if two numbers are permutations of each other?

We can generate the largest permutation of a given number. If the largest permutation of two numbers are identical, the two numbers are permutations of each other.

So I need a function, that returns the largest permutation of a number. It would be nice, if that function was vectorized.

max_perm <- function(t){
  require(magrittr)
  options(scipen=5)
  t %>% 
    as.character() %>% 
    str_split("") %>% 
    lapply(sort, decreasing=TRUE) %>% 
    lapply(paste0, collapse="") %>% 
    unlist() %>% 
    as.double()
}

Convert the input to character. Split at “”. That returns a list with vectors containing the individual digits of the input. lapply sorts the individual vectors in the list in decreasing order. Then lapply pastes the elements in each vector together with paste0 and “” as the separator. Then it is unlisted, and returned as numeric.

What is worth noting is a thing I was struggling with for far too long. R likes to write numbers in scientific notation. As in “1e+06”. I have not studied the phenomenon in detail. But options(scipen=5) solves the problem. It is the “penalty” used to decide when a number should be written in scientific notation. Unless I change that (trial and error, but it should be larger than whatever is default), as.character(1000000) will return “1e+06”. And the permutations of “1” “e” “+” “0” “6” are not terribly useful in this context.

I’m hazarding a guess that I don’t need to handle cubes of values of more than four digits.

Beginning with a vector of all numbers from 1 to 9999, I convert it to a dataframe. I transmute the first column to a column with the name x.
Then I mutate a second column, cube, into existence, and calculate it as the cube of the x-value. A third column, max_cube, is mutated with the result from my max_perm function above. And tha column is immediately used to group the data, so I get date grouped by identical maximum values of the permutations. I filter on the count of those groups, and only keep the groups that contain 5 elements. Then I ungroup it, and select just the cube column.

I now have a data frame with a single column containing 10 values. They are all cubes, five of them are permutations of each other. The other five are also permutaions of each other. And now I just have to take the smallest of them.

result <- 1:9999 %>% 
  as.double() %>% 
  as.data.frame() %>% 
  transmute(., x = .) %>% 
  mutate(cube = x**3) %>% 
  mutate(max_cube = max_perm(cube)) %>% 
  group_by(max_cube) %>% 
  filter(n()==5) %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  select(cube) %>% 
  min()

Before I print the result, so I can enter it into Project Euler, I set options(digits=17).

Done! A good exercise. And a valuable lesson in the importance of the options in R.

A rather popular chart type. Not really my favorite, but I can see how it makes things easier to understand for people who are not used to read and understand charts. The reason for my less than favourable view on waffle charts are probably linked to its overuse in meaningless infographics.

A waffle chart is a grid with squares/cells/icons/whatever, where each cell represents a number of something.

Lets make an example:

library(ggplot2)
library(waffle)

vec <- c(`Category 1 (10)`= 10 , `Category 2 (20)`= 20,
              `Category 3 (25)`= 24, `Category 4 (16)` = 16)

waffle(vec/2, rows=3, size=0.1, 
       colors=c("#c7d4b6", "#a3aabd", "#a0d0de", "#97b5cf"), 
       title="Four different categories of something", 
       xlab="1 square = 2 somethings")

One annoyance: waffle wants you to spell colours wrong.

waffle takes a named vector of values, rows sets the number of rows of blocks. Default is 10.

One standard way, is to show a 10×10 grid, where each cell represents 1% of the total:

waffle(vec/sum(vec)*100)

Bloody annoying – waffle rounds the values of the vector, leading to only 98 squares. So you have to manipulate your vector to get to 100. Well, actually it is probably a minor annoyance.

What if you want something else than coloured squares?

The arguments “use_glyph” and “glyph_size” makes that possible.
First, we’ll need the library extrafont

library(extrafont)

We’ll also need to have the “awesomefonts” installed. It can be downloaded from:

http://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.ttf

This should be easier if you are on a desktop machine. As I’m running this through my own installation of RStudio on a remote server, it was a bit more difficult.

I needed to place the “fontawesome.ttf” file in the “/usr/share/fonts/truetype/fontawesome” directory.

Then, running R as superuser on the commandline, I imported the extrafont library, and then ran “font_import()”.

But then it worked!

There is now a long list of 593 different icons, that can be used. If you want a list, just run fa_list().

And now, we can make a waffle chart with the glyph of our choice.

waffle(vec/2, rows=4, use_glyph = "wifi")

## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_text).

We can change the colours:

library(RColorBrewer)
waffle(vec/2, rows=4, use_glyph = "wifi", colors=brewer.pal(6,"Set1"))

## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_text).

Adjust the size

waffle(vec/2, rows=4, use_glyph = "wifi", colors=brewer.pal(6,"Set1"), glyph_size=5)

## Font Awesome by Dave Gandy - http://fontawesome.io

## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_text).

But that does not look very good.

waffle is based on ggplot, so we have access to the full range of functionality. But not all of them are going to look good in this context:

waffle(vec/2, rows=4, use_glyph = "wifi", colors=brewer.pal(4,"Set1")) +
  geom_label(label="42", size = 3)

## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing values (geom_text).

If we install a font that supports it, we even get access to the large number of UTF-8 glyphs. Here is a favorite of mine:

waffle(vec/2, rows=4, colors=brewer.pal(4,"Set1")) +
  geom_label(label=sprintf("\U1F427"), size = 8)

Which of course requires you to have a font on your computer that supports penguins.

Here is one:
http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola.zip

People do weird and wonderful things in Excel.

Other people then have to pull out the data from those spreadsheets.

“Other people”  tend to spend a lot of time crying into their coffee.

At the moment, I am trying to pull out data of a spreadsheet, where “something” can have a value of 1, 2 or 3. That is of course marked by an “x” in a cell. I need to convert that x to a number.

That is rather simple. What is not so simple, is that there can be two x’es. One, in black, to denote the current state of affairs. And a second x, in red, to denote what a future, state is wanted to be.

So – I need a way to get the color of an x. VBA can do that:

Function GetColour(ByVal Target As Range) As Single
Application.Volatile
GetColour = Target.Font.Color
End Function

And if I need a logical test:

Function IsBlack(ByVal Target As Range) As Boolean
Application.Volatile
If Target.Font.Color = 0 Then
IsBlack = True
Else
IsBlack = False
End If
End Function

 

This probably sounds like humble bragging. But I have recently – again – reailized that my biggest weakness is that I take responsibility.

Hey! How is that a weakness?

Well… It becomes a weakness when you continually take responsibility for stuff that is really not your responsibilty. To the extent that you get stress, hypertension and ulcers. And to the extent that it impacts negatively on the things that actually are your responsibility.

And I have just done it again. The ad for a meeting in the local party is not very readable. That is not my responsibility. It belongs to the chairman. Not me. I should simply notify him that it is not very readable. And trust that he will do something about it. Instead I am thinking about remaking it myself. It would not be very difficult. But I do get stressed. If I have to redesign the ad, I wont have time to cook dinner tonight. And clean the house.

This is something that I really have to get better at handling. Otherwise I’ll be a very responsible person, doing great things for people and organizations around me. While burning out very fast.

Crime is a bad thing. No doubt about it. And one of the main topics in todays debate climate is – “those ‘orrible immigrants are very criminal. Look at these numbers, they prove it!”. Usually written with caps-lock engaged.

Well. Maybe they are, and maybe they do. But if you want to use statistics to prove it – pretty please, do not obfuscate the numbers.

This is an example. A blog post from one of the more notable danish newspapers. In the US it would be regarded as communist, in the rest of the world we would think of it as relatively conservative.

https://kulturkamp.blogs.berlingske.dk/2018/08/17/anmeldte-voldtaegter-og-voldsforbrydelser-er-paa-det-hoejeste-nogensinde/

The claim is, that the number of reported rapes and other violent crimes in Denmark, are the highest ever. That is because of the increasing numbers of immigrants in Denmark, especially muslims. Use Google translate if you want the details.

Again, that claim might be true. But the graphs in the post, that supposedly documents the claim, are misleading. To say the least.

First – the numbers come from the Danish Statistical Bureau. They have a disclaimer, telling us that changes to the danish penal code, means that a number of sexual offenses have been reclassified as violent crimes since 2013. If the number of violent crimes suddenly includes crimes that did not use to be classified as violent crimes, that number will increase. Not much of a surprise. Yes, the post asks why the numbers are still increasing after that reclassification. One should expect them to level off. And again the post may have a valid point. I don’t know. But what I do know, is that the graphs are misleading.

Heres why. The y-axis has been cut of. Lets recreate the graphs, and take a look.

There are two graphs. The first shows the number of reported cases of rape from 1995 until today.

The second shows the total number of reported cases of violent crimes in the same period. Both sets of data comes from http://www.statistikbanken.dk/.

We’re going to need some libraries:

library(ggplot2)
library(gridExtra)

Lets begin by pulling the data.

There might be better ways, but I’ve simply downloaded the data. Two files:

violence <- read.csv("tab1.csv", sep=";", skip=3, header=F)
rape <- read.csv("tab2.csv", sep=";", skip=3, header=F)
violence <- violence[1:(nrow(violence)-7),]
rape <- rape[1:(nrow(rape)-7),]

The last seven lines are the notes about changes in which cases are counted in this statistics. I think that is a pretty important point, but they are difficult to plot.

The graph for rape, as presented in the post, and with a more sensible y-axis:

post <- ggplot(rape, aes(x=V1, y=V2)) +
  geom_line(group=1) +
  scale_x_discrete(breaks = rape$V1[seq(1, length(rape$V1), by = 20)]) +
  theme_classic()

nice <- post + ylim(0,max(rape$V2))
grid.arrange(post, nice, ncol=2)

And the one for violent crimes in general, again with the original on the left, and the better on the right:

post <- ggplot(violence, aes(x=V1, y=V2)) +
  geom_line(group=1) +
  scale_x_discrete(breaks = violence$V1[seq(1, length(violence$V1), by = 20)]) +
  theme_classic()

nice <- post + ylim(0,max(violence$V2))
grid.arrange(post, nice, ncol=2)

So, still, some pretty scary increases. And the change in what is counted should give an increase. But that increase should level off, which it does not. Clearly something is not as it should be. But lets be honest, the graphs on the right are not quite as scary as the ones on the left.

Also – that change in what is counted as sexual assaults – it can explain the initial increase, but then it should level off. That is a fair point. However, there were other things that changed in the period. #metoo for example. I think it would be reasonable to expect that a lot of cases that used to be brushed of as not very important, are now finally being reported. The numbers might actually have leveled off without #metoo.

Anyway, my point is, that if you want to use graphs to support your claims, do NOT cut off the y-axis to make them look more convincing.

First of all, this is in no way a statement on the immigration crisis in Europe. I do have opinions. But it is more a reaction or reflection on three maps I saw on this page.

Danish televison channel TV2 is illustrating the number of refugees or perhaps rather immigrants received in EU-memberstates in the period 2015 to 2017. This is the map showing the number of immigrants to EU in 2015

Note Germany. Germany welcomed the absolutely highest number of immigrants. What piqued my interest though, is that this might be a good illustration of the numbers, it is not really the relevant comparisons. Yes, Germany welcomed more refugees than Denmark did. But Germany is a rather larger country than Denmark. For a given value of “fair”, it is only fair that Germany takes more refugees than smaller countries.

A more relevant comparison might be the number of refugees compared to population. Or area. Sweden saw (at that time) no problems with welcoming a huge number of migrants, because, as they said, there are a lot of un-populated space in Sweden, plenty of room for everyone! Or perhaps GDP is a better way. Richer countries should shoulder a larger part of the challenge than poorer countries.

I’m not concerned here with what is fair. What concerns me is that the graphic is misleading. Lets make an attempt at fixing that. Or at least present a slightly different perspective on the data.

I’ll try to illustrate the number of migrants as a proportion of population in the different countries. The data is “stolen” directly from the news-channel. They have it from UNHCR, Eurostat and the European Parlament.

The first step will be to get the data.

url <- "http://nyheder.tv2.dk/udland/2018-06-28-se-kortet-saa-mange-asylansoegere-har-de-forskellige-eu-lande-taget"
data <- readLines(url)

By inspection, I can see that the relevant data is in these three lines:

dat.2015 <- data[460]
dat.2016 <- data[409]
dat.2017 <- data[358]

There is a small problem. Strange danish characters are encoded. Lets fix that:

library(stringr)
data <- str_replace_all(data,"\\\\u00d8", "Ø")
data <- str_replace_all(data,"\\\\u00e6", "æ")
data <- str_replace_all(data,"\\\\u00f8", "ø")

And load it into the separate variables again:

dat.2015 <- data[460]
dat.2016 <- data[409]
dat.2017 <- data[358]

Next, I need to get the names of the countries, and the number of migrants received in each country.

The data I’m after looks like this:

\“Bulgarien\”:{\“valueheat\”:20365,\“valuecolored\”:\“none\”,\“description\”:\“\”},

And the regular expression picking that out of the data ought to be:

‘\“(\p{L}+)\”:{\“valueheat\”:(\d+|\“\”),’

For some reason that is not working. I probably should try to figure that out, but I’m on vacation, and would rather drink cold white wine that dig too deep into the weirdness that is regular expressions in R.

Instead I’m going to use this simpler pattern:

pattern <- '(\")(\\w+)(.*?)(\\d+|\\\"\\\")'

And then fix problems later.

Extracting the data:

dat.2015 <- unlist(str_extract_all(dat.2015, pattern))
dat.2016 <- unlist(str_extract_all(dat.2016, pattern))
dat.2017 <- unlist(str_extract_all(dat.2017, pattern))

Inspecting the data, reveals that the interesting parts are lines 23 to 111.

dat.2015 <- dat.2015[23:111]
dat.2016 <- dat.2016[23:111]
dat.2017 <- dat.2017[23:111]

An example of two lines:

dat.2015[11:12]

## [1] "\"Danmark\":{\"valueheat\":20935"              
## [2] "\"valuecolored\":\"none\",\"description\":\"\""

First, lets get rid of the second line. There are one of those for each country.

Secondly, I’ll remove the first to characters in the first line. \“ to be precise.

And thirdly, I’ll split that line on \”:{\“valueheat\”:

Using the nice pipes makes that easy:

library(purrr)
dat.2015 <- dat.2015 %>%
  discard(str_detect, "valuecolored") %>%
  substring(2) %>%
  strsplit(split="\":{\"valueheat\":",fixed=TRUE)

That should give me a list where each element is a vector with two elements:

dat.2015[[8]]

## [1] "Finland" "32345"

Neat! Lets do that with the other years:

dat.2016 <- dat.2016 %>%
  discard(str_detect, "valuecolored") %>%
  substring(2) %>%
  strsplit(split="\":{\"valueheat\":",fixed=TRUE)

dat.2017 <- dat.2017 %>%
  discard(str_detect, "valuecolored") %>%
  substring(2) %>%
  strsplit(split="\":{\"valueheat\":",fixed=TRUE)

Now, lets get these data into some dataframes. First I’m unlisting the data, then I pour it into a matrix to get the right shape. And then I’m converting the matrices to dataframes:

dat.2017 <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(dat.2017), ncol=2, byrow=T), stringsAsFactors = F)
dat.2016 <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(dat.2016), ncol=2, byrow=T), stringsAsFactors = F)
dat.2015 <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(dat.2015), ncol=2, byrow=T), stringsAsFactors = F)

There is a slight problem. Albania was the first country in the list. And the structure of the raw data was a bit different.

dat.2015[1,1]

## [1] "regions\":{\"Albanien"

Lets fix that:

dat.2015[1,1] <- "Albanien"
dat.2016[1,1] <- "Albanien"
dat.2017[1,1] <- "Albanien"

And let me just change the column names:

colnames(dat.2015) <- c("Land", "2015")
colnames(dat.2016) <- c("Land", "2016")
colnames(dat.2017) <- c("Land", "2017")

“Land” is danish for “country”.

I’m going to need just one dataframe. I get that by joining the three dataframes:

library(dplyr)
total <- left_join(dat.2015, dat.2016, by="Land")
total <- left_join(total, dat.2017, by="Land")

The numbers are saved as characters. Converting them to numeric:

total$`2015` <- as.numeric(total$`2015`)

## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion

total$`2016` <- as.numeric(total$`2016`)

## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion

total$`2017` <- as.numeric(total$`2017`)

## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion

That introduced some NAs. Countries where there are no data.

Inspecting the data, I can see that there are data for all three years for some countries. For other countries, there are no data at all. The function complete.cases() will return true for a row without NAs.

Using that to get rid of countries where we don’t have complete data:

total <- total[complete.cases(total),]

Next is getting some figures for the populations.

The relevant page on Wikipedia is:

url <- 'https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdens_landes_befolkningsst%C3%B8rrelser'

Getting that:

library(XML)
library(httr)
r <- GET(url)
doc <- readHTMLTable(
  doc=content(r, "text"))
tabellen <- doc$'NULL'

colnames(tabellen) <-  apply(tabellen[1,],2,as.character)

I’m only interested in the country name, and the population:

tabellen <- tabellen %>%
  select(`Land (eller territorium)`, Population)

Renaming the colums:

colnames(tabellen) <- c("Land", "Population")
tabellen$Population <- as.character(tabellen$Population)
tabellen$Population <- as.numeric(str_remove_all(tabellen$Population, fixed(".")))

## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion

And while I’m at it, the second line gets rid of the factors, and the third removes the thousand separators (“.”)

Now I can join the dataframe containing population figures, with the dataframe containing countries and number of migrants:

total <- left_join(total, tabellen, by="Land")

## Warning: Column `Land` joining character vector and factor, coercing into
## character vector

There are three smaller problems. Cyprys, France and Ireland. The problem is that the country name I get from Wikipedia contains a note. I might be able to get rid of that by code. I’m going to do it manually.

total[10,5] <- 4635400
total[7,5] <- 67286000
total[3,5] <- 847000

Now I have a nice dataframe with the name of the countries (in danish), the numbe of migrants received in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and the population in 2018.

Now it is time to look at some maps.

library(ggplot2)
library(rworldmap)

## ### Welcome to rworldmap ###

## For a short introduction type :   vignette('rworldmap')

I am going to match the countries in my dataframe, with the countries I get from the map data. That requires that I have the english names for the countries in my dataframe.

This is the translation:

enland <- c("Belgium", "Bulgaria", "Cyprus", "Denmark", "Estonia", "Finland", "France", "Greece", "Netherlands", "Ireland",
          "Italy", "Croatia", "Latvia", "Lithuania", "Luxembourg", "Malta", "Poland", "Portugal", "Romania", "Slovakia",
          "Slovenia", "Spain", "United Kingdom", "Sweden", "Czech Rep.", "Germany", "Hungary", "Austria"  )

Getting that into the data frame:

total$enland <- enland

Next, lets get the map:

worldmap <- getMap()

That retrieves data for the entire world. I’m only interested in EU:

EU <- worldmap[which(worldmap$NAME %in% enland),]
EU <- map_data(EU)

## 
## Attaching package: 'maps'

## The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':
## 
##     map

The first line extracts the part of the world map that has names in the list of countries that I have data for.
map_data() converts that into a nice structure that is suitable for entering into ggplot.

Next step is calculating the number of migrants received in each country as a proportion of that countrys population:

total <- total %>%
  mutate(`2015` = `2015`/Population*100, `2016` = `2016`/Population*100, `2017`=`2017`/Population*100)

I’m mutating the columns 2015-2017 by dividing by population. And multiplying by 100 to get percentages.

The almost final step, is to join my migrant-proportions with the map data:

total <- left_join(total,EU, by=c("enland"="region") )

The map data does not call the countries for countries. Rather their names are saved in the variable “region”.

And now the final step. I’m going to need the data on tidy form. So I’m loading tidyr.

Then I pass the data frame to select(), where I pick out the variables I need. Long(itude), lat(itude), 2015, 2016 and 2017, and the name of the country.
That is passed to gather(), where I make a new row for each year, with the proportions in the new variabels year and prop.

All that is passed to ggplot, and a layer where the polygons describing the countries are plotted. They are with a colour matching the proportions. And grouped by “group”. This is important. Grouping by country name gives weird results. I’ll get back to that. color=“white” plots the lines in the polygons in white.

Finally, I facet the data on year.

library(tidyr)
total %>%
  select(long,lat,`2015`,`2016`,`2017`, group) %>%
  gather(year, prop,  `2015`:`2017`)%>%
  ggplot() +
    geom_polygon(aes(long, lat, fill = prop, group = group), color = "white") +
    theme_void() +
    facet_wrap(~year, ncol=2)

Thats it!
And now the picture is slightly different. What is interesting is that Germany still takes a higher proportion of the migrants than other countries. But in 2015, they didn’t. That was the year when the german chancellor Angela Merkel said the famous words “Wir schaffen das”, We’ll manage. But also the year when Hungary and sweden welcomed migrants in numbers equalling 1.79% and 1.65% of their population respectively. You can compare that with the fact that Germany the same year received migrants equalling 0.58% of their population.

A cynic might claim that it is no surprise that Sweden and Hungary closed their borders late in 2015.

Any way, that is a different subject. I just think that these three maps are slightly more informative than what TV2 provided.

Also, I promised to get back to the group thingy.

Making the same plot, but grouping on country names:

total %>%
  select(long,lat,`2015`,`2016`,`2017`, group, enland) %>%
  gather(year, prop,  `2015`:`2017`)%>%
  ggplot() +
    geom_polygon(aes(long, lat, fill = prop, group = enland), color = "white") +
    theme_void()

What happens is that the polygons describing Italy are grouped in a way that connects the parts describing sicily to the northern part of Italy. That looks weird. The same happens with Sardinia.

Finally. I have not been very consistent in my use of words. I have used “received” and “welcomed” interchangeably. Hungary and Denmark has not been very welcoming. But we are talking about real humans here, and welcoming simply sounds nicer than received. Complicating the situation was the fact that a lot of the arrivals were not actually what we would normally call refugees. At least not refugees from war. So I have also not been consistent in the use of “migrant” vs “refugee”. That is not really my point. The point is that we should always think about how these kinds of numbers are presented.