November 2011
16 posts
4 tags
Google Searches and Layaway
A few weeks ago I got pummeled on Twitter for questioning the need for layaway, which was being touted heavily at the time by Wal-Mart.
I was persuaded by arguments that layaway doesn’t make sense in an era of big box stories that seem to have an endless supply of goods from China. It’s less important today, for example, to secure an early partial purchase of that bike for Timmy at...
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A Rough Year for AMR
American Airlines’ parent company, AMR Corp., announced today that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. AOL DailyFinance summed up the effect on investors:
AMR’s investors got a nasty little shock after the announcement, as the company’s stock price slid from a close of $1.62 per share on Monday to $0.23 on Tuesday morning. Over a longer timetable, AMR...
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A 'Radical' View of DC's Demographics
I’ve been obsessed with William Rankin’s ‘radical cartography’ site for more than a year. One map in particular — a detailed view of Washington, D.C.’s segregated neighborhoods — has stuck with me more than others over time.
The map used 2000 Census data to show how black residents are clustered in northeast and southeast neighborhoods, while white residents live...
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LSU vs. Arkansas
Today’s big football game between top-ranked LSU and Arkansas marks the 57th meeting between the two rivals since 1906, in what’s become known as the “Battle for the Golden Boot.” LSU has won 60% percent of the games over the last century.
These games have been become increasingly high-scoring contests. In 2007, for example, the teams scored 98 points, with Arkansas...
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How Dallas Cowboys Penalties Compare to other NFL...
The Dallas Cowboys in recent years have been among the most-penalized teams in the NFL, a fact that may have contributed to their disappointing seasons.
This year, though, the team is averaging about 54 yards in penalties per game, roughly the same as the average NFL team (before tonight). Oakland, by the way, has been penalized the most: 89 yards per game. Green Bay has been penalized the least:...
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American Troop Deployments
A nice stack graph from The Economist:
THE American government is keen to show its commitment to security in Asia by putting boots on the ground there. As this analysis shows, the number of American troops (Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force active duty personnel) in Asia is only slightly smaller than the number in Europe, where Americans in uniform are largely a hangover from the carve-up of...
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Mapping Migration, Pt. 2
Earlier this year I posted about this interesting interactive map that visualized residents’ migration based on tax-return data. Selecting counties highlights inflow and outflow migration of residents. This one shows D.C., where I moved last spring:
The map creator, Jon Bruner, a journalist at Forbes, recently released a much-improved version of the map. It’s better for a number of...
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Mapping Idaho Unemployment
A viz from my day job:
Built with TileMill.
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New York Income, A/C
New Yorkers will have to endure hotter summers and other severe weather events over the next century because of global climate change, according to a new report.
The report contains this map of New York City, which shows neighborhood poverty levels and the proportion of air conditioners in homes. Areas with lower incomes, like Harlem and Washington Heights, among others, have a lower air...
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Mapping Mobility
The U.S. Census Bureau today released a report on geographic mobility based on data from the American Community Survey:
The comparison of data on state of residence in 2010 to data on state and region of birth reflects the cumulative effect of long-term patterns of migration. Fifty-nine percent of people in the United States were born in their state of residence. However, there is significant...
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Charting Marriage, Education
Lately I’ve been experimenting with bubble charts in R based on Nathan Yau’s great tutorial. In this case, I wanted to see the relationship between higher education and marriage among women by state.
Some states — such as Idaho, Utah and Wyoming — have both high marriage rates and low higher education rates. But that really says more abou those states than whether marriage and higher...
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Where Do Your State's Freshmen Come From?
The Chronicle of Higher Education last month published an interesting piece about competition among universities for out-of-state students.
Public universities across the country are engaged in an all-out war for out-of-state students. Deep cuts in support are driving the search for revenue, and in many states, a stagnating pool of local applications has pushed colleges to recruit broadly. The...
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Mapping 'Poisoned Places'
NPR and the Center for Public Integrity have teamed up for a series of this stories this week about facilities that emit toxic chemicals. One part of the package is this interactive map, which plots more than 13,000 regulated facilities across the country — and also colors the dots based on the potential risk to people living around them:
See a larger interactive version of the map, which was...
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Best of 'The Daily Viz'
I started this little blog 10 months ago as a place to post my experiments with data visualization. Some posts have flopped, but a few caught fire. Here are the top eight, ordered by popularity:
1. Mapping Where GOP Candidates Raise Their Campaign Donations
2. Mapping London Riots, ‘Deprivation’
3. Rick Perry and Jobs
4. Analyzing Two Rick Perry Speeches: 1998 vs. 2011
5. D.C. Crime...
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Plotting 'Multicides'
Bill Marsh and other artists at The New York Times created this timeline of world atrocities over the centuries.
Estimating the tolls from such horrors is an inexact science, given war’s nature and the mysteries of antiquity. The deadliest “multicides” are more plentiful in recent centuries, given that there were more people to kill and better ways to kill them on a grand scale. Even so,...
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Google Search Insights: Occupy Wall Street vs. Tea...
Google’s politics and elections team compared search trends for the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. Here’s what they found:
Searches for Occupy Wall Street started on Sept 16th & peaked one month later on October 15th
NY is tops in searches, right? Wrong. Top 3 states for most “Occupy” searches: Vermont, Oregon, New York
Search interest in OWS is higher than the...
