Maps of the world are a perfect example of how difficult it is to prevent bias creeping into your modeling.
People always have a perspective. And it’s difficult to eliminate or compensate for it.
Vox have a great video that discusses the difficulty of producing an accurate map of the world. It starts with the presenter slicing up an inflatable globe and trying to spread it out across the floor—with limited success.
You can see the impact of different mapping approaches in a gallery on Wikipedia. And, if you want to see how the dominant Mercator projection mangles the size of countries, there’s an interactive tool that illustrates the effect. Try dragging Greenland onto Africa for a dramatic example.
The National Geographic Society have apparently adopted the Winkel tripel projection due to the trade-off it makes between preserving shape and size.
Effective data science is often about choosing the appropriate trade-offs.
