Data Visualization on Niklas Lange

Grade Inflation in Scotland

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This piece was written for the Strathclyde Telegraph; what follows is the first draft, which I put together over about a week and posted here while the final version went through editing.

Scottish Highers have been a crucial component of university applications for decades, and published results run back to 2009. Given recent economic inflation, this correspondent was curious whether a similar trend exists in Scottish education. Analysing the data published on Scottish Highers reveals some intriguing trends.

Strathclyde's Changing Demographics

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of journalism — The Economist in particular — so I thought it would be fun to try a bit of data journalism of my own and pitch it to my university newspaper. I started by looking into the demographics of the University of Strathclyde; what follows is a short report on what changed.

Over the years Strathclyde has been through a lot: Brexit, Covid and strikes may all have left a mark on the university’s make-up and capacity. This report goes to the data to see which trends actually show up.

Smoking in Scotland – How Households Have Quit Cigarettes

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 18:53:38 +0100

Trends in Smoking Habits Across Scotland (2012–2019)

From 2012 to 2019, the Scottish Survey Core Question (SSCQ)—a project combining several large household surveys (more here)—was used to track smoking rates across Scotland.

The data shows a clear trend: more and more Scots are quitting cigarettes. While we cannot determine causation from this dataset, we can highlight significant differences across age groups and constituencies. These findings reveal how smoking has declined at different rates within the population.