BW #35: Terrorism

As I wrote in a personal note several days ago (https://www.bambooweekly.com/p/a-personal-update-about-the-situation), this has been a difficult week for those of us living in Israel. The situation is tense, no one really knows what's going to happen next, and every passing day brings more awful, shocking stories and pictures of what happened on Saturday and Sunday. I've tried to avoid seeing the worst of the pictures and videos, and what I've already seen and heard is stomach turning.

In my city of Modi'in, it's very quiet. A bit too quiet, I'd say, punctuated by the sounds of air-force jets and distant booms from the Iron Dome defense system. Very few cars are driving around, many shops are closed (because their owners and/or employees have been called up for reserve duty), and people are donating food, clothing, and medicine to the thousands who have lost their homes (as well as loved ones). Supermarkets and stores are out of many supplies, both because the farmers and distributors have been called up for reserve duty, and also because people are stocking up, afraid of what's going to happen.

I donated blood yesterday, and because I got there 20 minutes before the donation station opened, and begged the person in charge to jump the line so that I could return home to teach, I was "only" there for 3.5 hours. A friend who got there half an hour later was turned away, told that they already had as many donors as they needed.

There's a sense of loss and concern, but also of solidarity — that we'll get through this together. The people who led our anti-government protests for many months have turned their organizations into conduits to supply transportation and goods to people who need them.

I hope that things become better and more peaceful as soon as possible. But that'll take some time.

I'll add that I've been overwhelmed by messages from many subscribers, students, and others expressing support and concern. Thank you. It really means a lot.

This week, in the wake of everything that is happening around me, I thought it appropriate to look at some data about terrorism. I found a data set put together by "Vision of Humanity" (https://www.visionofhumanity.org), based in Sydney, Australia. According to its Web site, VoH aims to be the "destination for peace providing analysis, data, and editorial through a lens of peace, security and development," and uses research from the Institute for Economics and Peace (https://www.economicsandpeace.org/), also based in Sydney.

By the way, there’s no picture this week. I tried a few things on DALL-E, and decided that nothing was appropriate. Let’s hope for better news, and thus cheerier topics, in the near future.

Data and eight questions

This week's data set comes from the annual "Global Terrorism Index" (https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/global-terrorism-index/), which looks at terrorism at countries and regions around the world. The data used to create the report, along with other related reports, from:

    https://www.visionofhumanity.org/public-release-data/

The data itself is downloadable as an Excel file:

    /content/files/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/gti-2023-overall-scores-2011-2022.xlsx

Here are my eight questions and for this week. The learning goals include: Working with multi-sheet Excel files, working with CSV files, joining data frames, grouping, sorting, and plotting. I'll provide my detailed solutions tomorrow, including the Jupyter notebook that I used to solve these problems myself:

• Load the data into a data frame. We're interested in the "Overall scores" sheet from the Excel file, with the "Country" column as the index, and the columns whose names end in the word "rank".
• In 2022, what countries were ranked in the top 10% of those having terrorist problems? Display the countries and their names, sorted by score, with #1 at the top.