On my browser, the little carousel at the top has different sized images and it causes the entire body to keep jerking up, and down, and up, and down. I had the patience to inspect the graphs because it's quite interesting, but this little blip didn't improve things any. Thanks though!
Well.. it's simply using the size of the dot for the 3rd dimesion. Not a new idea.
What makes it visually appealing is that the 3rd dimension is time. And the x/y parameters do not change much over time. So many dots of similar size are close to each other generating a path.
Also the motion blur from one dot to the next is useful only because the 3rd dimension has a special meaning. It would not work if it was "income" instead of "time".
Dot size is used frequently, but I haven't seen many static visualizations that plot the series multiple times using cues (in this case, dot size and opacity) to indicate the data relationship. I see it all the time in animation form, though.
It reminds me of the famous Minard chart of Napoleon's adventures [1], but doesn't draw the focus as completely to the time dimension as his does to the survivor dimension.
I think you're right about the special nature of the third dimension in this case. I wonder what things other than time it'd work for. It feels like it'd work well for other things that are time-like -- results from different iterations of an experiment, for example.
Because of the catastrophic social and economic situation in those times. During these times there were parts of Moscow that didn't get any heating during winter, that's how bad it was. Many didn't get paid for months, some for years and many companies were closed at that time. I still don't understand the logic in going to work even though you receive no payment.
I've been there in 1998 and I remember a situation where children were stealing food out of my hands in broad daylight on a highly frequented street. (I would have given it to them anyways if they would have asked)
I guess that many lost hope during these times and therefore didn't plan to have families.
Since then much has changed for the better, at least in economic terms. Income per capita has increased 400%, unemployment has decreased below 5%, people can make plans for their future, get married and have children.
So I had always heard this is the case, and now believe this must be a common misconception. See Table 6 in this file from the Office of National Statistics:
While from 2004 to 2012 total UK fertility increased from 1.80 to 1.98, the fertility rate for non-UK born women actually /decreased/ from 2.50 to 2.29 (albeit in a slightly messy non-monotonic fashion) while the fertility rate for UK born mothers /increased/ from 1.69 to 1.90 quite monotonically.
It would be interesting to see the stats including 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant mothers (i.e. born in UK both with parents born elsewhere).
I wasn't aware of UK-born mothers' increased fertility rate.
However, I'll argue that even if the fertitily rate of immigrant mothers decreased, this can explain the data because if more immigrants came in, the average fertility rate goes up (given that immigrants' decreased rate is still quite a bit higher than UK-born).
