Further Analysis

Extending the analysis backwards to 1996, the start of the “Sunshine List” we can get a more complete picture of salary changes for Ontario pathologists.

The analysis and the visual shows that:

• Since 1997, pathologist packages have increased on average 5.5% annually
• From 1997 to 2007, packages increased 6.6% annually and exponentially which was clearly unsustainable
• From 2007 to 2012, packages saw little to no growth
• In 2013, there was an unprecedented, single-year growth of 22%

Contact

I contacted the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. Their media relations passed me on to the Ontario Association of Pathologists, whom I had already contacted and have yet to see a response. A sensible strategy for them would be to ignore enquiries from bloggers regardless of if they had anything to hide.

Furthermore, We can see that:

• A similar shape to 2012 in 2008, 2006, 2004, and 2000. In all of these years, the very top (1000 or so) of the list saw considerably more growth than those near the top (ranks 1000 to 4000 or so).
• 2009-2011 were weak growth years, with 2009 and 2011 showing actually lower salary growth at the very top

Naturally I saw the infographic, didn’t like it, and as an exercise, spruced it up.

Improved:

Original:

By today’s standards, publishing an intimidatingly long list of approaching 100,000 names and salaries across 100 or so HTML or PDF pages does not constitute disclosure. Sure, it’s great if you want to look up how much your boss makes or to keep an eye on the salaries of TVO presenters, but after that it falters. Making data possible to access, and making it easy to access are different things. If the data were published in print, but not made available online, would that be acceptable? Was it in 1996?

Any data journalist who wants to work with the data, must first scrape it from those hundred pages, which either requires some technical skill and some time, or brute force and quite a lot of time. Even answering simple questions like, “How many names are on the list?” and “What is the average salary?” have to wait for this scraping to be performed.

What about the general public? Even if they’ve never heard of scraping a web page, they should still have natural questions like: How many people from each employer is on the list? How much money are CEOs making on average this year? Is that more than last year? How many people on the list are Pathologists?

Easy change

At a minimum, the entire list should be made available for download in a single file in CSV and/or XLS format. This would remove barriers and save time for any data journalist wanting to access the information. This should be trivially easy to do, because by the looks of the URLs, the 2013 (for 2012) disclosure is already stored in a database.

Empower the ecosystem

Not only does this mean that citizens and journalists could better access the data, but it also would enable data visualisation and interaction practitioners to create tools for the entire public to access the information.

Appearing in both the 2013 and 2012 disclosures, 195 pathologists saw their average package (salary + taxable benefits) increase by $57k or 20.6% from $280k to $337k. The top 200 earning pathologists in 2012 averaged $348k, a 25.4% increase over 2011.

Ontario Public Salary Disclosure

Every year since 1996, the Ontario Ministry of Finance has released a list of all public sector employees who earned more than $100,000 in the previous year.

Why?

So what’s happening here? Why are pathologists seeing a 25% raise while the rest of the list shows a very reasonable growth of 2.2%?

At this point all we have are hypotheses. Analysis of the publicly available data has uncovered a surprising feature, and further investigation is required to find the cause. This is exactly the sort of process we should expect from an open government/open data initiative like the Sunshine List.

Detail

• Pathologist
• Pathologist / Pathologiste
• Pathologist Laboratory Medical Director and Chief of Medical Staff
• Pathologist/Laboratory Medical Director
• Pathologist/ Anatomopathologiste
• Pathologist – Pathology / Pathologiste
• Associate Director Pathology / Directrice adjointe Pathologie
• Neuropathologist / Professor
• Neuropathologist
• Laboratory Pathologist / Pathologiste du laboratoire
• Laboratory Pathologist/Pathologiste du laboratoire
• Medical Director Clinical Lab Services / Pathologiste
• Pathologist/Pathologiste
• Associate Director Pathology / Directeur adjoint Pathologie
• Associate Pathologist / Pathologiste adjoint
• Associate Pathologist/Pathologiste adjoint
• Senior Associate Pathologist
• Senior Associate Pathologist / Pathologiste associé(e) principal(e)
• Division Head Haematopathology
• Chief Pathology & Laboratory Director
• Associate Pathologist
• Associate Pathologist / Pathologiste associé(e)
• Pathologist and Director Laboratory Medicine
• Pathologist/Director Laboratory Medicine
• Director Pathology / Directeur Pathologie
• Pathologist–in–Chief
• Pathologist-in-Chief
• Associate Head of Pathology
• Associate Head Pathology
• Division Head Pathology
• Pathologist – General / Pathologiste général
• Pathologist – General/Pathologiste général
• Anatomical Pathologist / Anatomopathologiste
• Anatomical Pathologist/Anatompoathologiste
• Chief Pathologist
• Administrative Director Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
• Senior Pathologists Assistant
• Speech Pathologist – Voice
• Speech Pathologist Voice
• Administrative Director Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
• Haematopathologist
• Senior Manager Pathology & Laboratory Medicine
• Anatomic Pathologist / Professor
• Pathologist & Discipline Director

Sources:

http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/pssd/

The top 1,000 employees with the highest package (salary + taxable benefits) in the Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure, the so-called “Sunshine List”, saw an average increase of almost $25,000 in 2012 compared to the previous year, an increase of 7.2%, much higher than the bottom half of the 80,000-strong list which saw an increase of only 2.2%.

Is this cause for alarm? Highly paid CEO’s are fully in the public spotlight, and the many many school principals have their pay closely monitored, but what about the highly paid individuals near, but not at the top? The data shows that for them, 2012 was a good year.

Every year since 1996, the Ontario Ministry of Finance has released a list of all public sector employees who earned more than $100,000 in the previous year.

Oversight

We can all see that “Sunshine List” champion Thomas Mitchell, President & CEO of Ontario Power Generation took a pay cut this year, but with approaching 100,000 names on the list, more sophisticated, data-drive oversight is possible.

Government-friendly observes point out that the average salary on the list has decreased, just like last year, but that is a red herring. Anyone can add over 9,000 people earning just over $100k to a list with an average salary of $129k and bring down the average. As the list continues to grow from the bottom, we can expect the average salary to decline, without this being any indicator of public fiscal discipline.

Opposition partisans will lament the increasing growth of the list, 9,600 more this year and 7,500 the year before. This is again misleading. The pyramid shape of any organisation tells us that there are more people as you move down the salary brackets. With a perfectly reasonable average salary growth at just over 2.5%, 9,600 employees graduated to the “Sunshine List” this year after having earned around $98k last year. Probably more than 9,600 employees, currently earning around $98k will be new additions to the list next year, and more the year after. Inflation and economic growth will ensure that the list grows, and the pyramid shape will ensure that it grows faster.

Top 1,000

So who are these lucky 1,000 who on average made 7.2% more in 2012?

• 583 individuals working in hospitals
• 176 Pathologists
• 50 Chief Executive Officers
• 66 Vice-Presidents (Senior, Executive, etc.)
• 79 Psychiatrists
• 86 employees in electricity
• 56 Vice-Presidents (Senior, Executive, etc.)
• 144 working at Universities
• 100 Professors

Big raises

Of the 1,000, 737 can be matched exactly by name and organisation type to last year. 92 of those fortunate souls saw an increase of over 25%! At the top of the pack was Mohamed Abelaziz Elbestawi, Vice-President Research/Professor at McMaster University who was reported as paid salary $266k in 2011 and $506k in 2012! Trung Kien Mai, a Pathologist at The Ottawa Hospital saw his paid salary move from $306k in 2011 to $515k in 2012!

• 83 work in hospitals
• 50 are Pathologists

More questions

At this point, this analysis raises more questions than it answers, but that is to be expected from an analysis of this salary disclosure data. The Public Salary Disclosure Act can help us find questions, not answers.

• Salaries near the top grew substantially
• Those salaries grew much more, even on a % basis than those at the bottom
• Growth was higher than expected given slow economic growth
• Some individuals can be shown to have experienced extraordinary raises
• Pathologists do well, and 2012 was a particularly good year for some

Source

http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/publications/salarydisclosure/pssd/

Users can:

• Define a complete 4-level hierarchy, breaking a concept down to four levels
• Customise some aspects
• Export to SVG

This is an alpha release of the tool, hopefully the first of many. Any and all feedback is welcome.

Also, if you have the time and ability to do similar or better things, I invite you to contact me regarding collaboration.

Users can:

• Define a complete 4-level hierarchy, breaking a concept down to four levels
• Customise ring-sizes
• Customise colouring
• Customsie text
• Export to SVG

This is an alpha release of the tool, hopefully the first of many. Any and all feedback is welcome.

Also, if you have the time and ability to do similar or better things, I invite you to contact me regarding collaboration.

I have created an interactive tool using D3.js that gives the user a chance to see and interact with the typical k-means clustering algorithm from data mining/machine learning. It is my hope, that it will enable students to develop an intuition for how the algorithm works, and a better appreciation of its shortcomings.

You can learn more about k-means clustering here.

• Display a ranking against two parameters simultaneously
• Display both as a ranking as well as relative values. You can easily see both what is higher and lower and also by how much
• Easily compare two teams against both parameters as well as their relative performance against both parameters (i.e. comparing line slopes)
• Easily identify big movers between the two measures

• Slightly complex, so requires the reader to figure it out a bit
• Alternative to showing two rankings at once would be to take a design decision to only show one, that which is deemed most important
• Current solution requires hover which is not mobile-friendly
• Solution is D3.js and therefore SVG and thus IE 7- unfriendly