Comments on: Hats off to Greenland

By: ribble

ribble — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:56:17 +0000

Saying that one of Dorothy’s maps is not really of use is like saying that because they keep driving in circles, Nascar drivers aren’t really getting anywhere.

By: Jameses

Jameses — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:38:09 +0000

What’s a bet that the majority of the >28,172 times Greenland is mentioned (Pop 56,344) it is in relation to Climate Change or the Gulf Stream.

I think the map’s not really of use, given that you would expect the NY Times’ coverage of U.S. issues to be state or city based rather than a generic country label. As for other countries, stock market and political pieces would often refer to the capital city than the country itself.

I do wonder as to the colour of Antarctica given it’s population of 4,000 in summer and about 1,000 in winter.

By: nex

nex — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:05:36 +0000

Well, OK, when you change ‘USA’ to ‘United States’, which sounds more like the NYT, you get over 11000 as well. But anyway, the idea is still sound: Australia, excluding the term “New Zealand”, gets about 800,000 hits on nytimes.com, NZ by itself about 100,000, and both together about 70,000. So, (not quite) half of the time NZ is mention, it’s mentioned in conjunction with Australia, and every time that happens it increases NZ’s ratio 5 times as much.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:52:33 +0000

Search results for “New Zealand” in nytimes.com in the past year = 359

Search results for “Australia New Zealand” in nytimes.com in the past year = 118

Thus about one third of the time that New Zealand was mentioned on nytimes.com in the past year, Australia was also mentioned. However, when Australia was mentioned (which occurred 1,156 times), New Zealand was also mentioned only 10% of the time.

So you’re both right!

(PS – When Mexico was mentioned, the United States was also mentioned close to half the time.)

By: nex

nex — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:50:21 +0000

The phrase “Australia and New Zealand”, restricted to “site:nytimes.com”, gives over 11000 hits on Google. “USA and Mexico”: 13 hits. So, no, one is not like the other, and calling the idea plain dumb doesn’t turn out to be all that smart.

By: antman

antman — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:36:46 +0000

The idea that NZ is often mentioned in the same breath as Australia is just plain dumb. That’s like saying that Mexico is often mentioned in the same breath as the USA.

By: nex

nex — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:18:37 +0000

I imagine NZ is often mentioned in the same breath as Australia. Now, because Australia has five times the population, each joint mention drives up the ratio for NZ five times as much. C.f. how much Mongolia stands out between China and Russia. Surely that’s because it only has 3 million citizens, not because it was mentioned so often in the news.

By: TJIC

TJIC — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:04:32 +0000

> It would be nice to have the same map, but with the countries represented by size, not colour.

There’s a name for that: “area cartogram”.

By: jonathan hardie

jonathan hardie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:43:41 +0000

And I thought we New Zealanders just had an over inflated sense of self-importance… turns out the world agrees :-)

By: Colin

Colin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:17:25 +0000

…or even relevance. The world would be reduced to a handful of nations.