February 2012
13 posts
2 tags
What Car Brands Tell Us About Our Political...
Interesting…
When it comes to cars, the results are often predictable. It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that the data, as collected by Scarborough Research, show that drivers of hybrid automobiles tend to skew Democrat and are highly likely to vote. Subaru owners, as well. Saab and Volvo owners also lean left and vote in large percentages, though not by as wide a margin.
3 tags
How Did This Year's Oscar Ratings, Length Compare?
This year’s Academy Awards presentation seemed to drag on forever, but it wasn’t actually that long compared to past shows. The event last lasted 194 minutes, which is slightly longer than the average since the mid-1980s (183 minutes), but relatively short compared to the four-hour-plus show in 2002:
About 39.3 million people tuned in for the show, a four-percent increase over the...
1 tag
Mapping with TileMill
I just returned from the NICAR journalism convention in St. Louis, where I helped teach hands-on panels for using TileMill, the open-source mapping application. This first map we made shows the murder rate per 100,000 residents in the nation’s largest cities:
We also mapped the poverty rate:
Download the data and code
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Candidate Fundraising vs. Super PAC Spending in...
From Huffington Post:
Reports about January’s fundraising numbers, released on February 20, have focused on two narratives: Mitt Romney’s limited fundraising and high burn rate and the role that super PACs are playing in an increasingly contested Republican primary. HuffPost decided to combine those narratives together to make a graphic of candidate and super PAC fundraising and...
3 tags
Holiday Viz: Mapping the Birthplaces of U.S....
Since I get the day off, I figured I should repay our presidents by honoring their birthplaces with two maps made with Google Fusion Tables. This first map places points on their home towns (see larger interactive version):
Here’s the same data but aggregated by state and mapped with polygons. Darker shades represent more presidents (see larger interactive version):
Data source:...
DC's 'Dining Desert'
The Washington Post has a story today about the lack of sit-down restaurants across the Anacostia River in neighborhoods that are among the poorest in the city.
For decades, the main arteries east of the Anacostia River have been dominated by carry-out joints and fast-food chains, their menus catering to an African American population that is the city’s most impoverished. In wards 7 and 8, with...
7 tags
Which European Soccer Leagues Have The Most...
Has European football gotten increasingly boring over the years? If you like offense, perhaps.
Since the mid-1950s, fewer and fewer goals on average have been scored per match. The trend is evident among the major national leagues (Spain, Italy, England and Germany) and also the Champions League, in which the best teams from each country compete for a European title.
Goals per match in the...
2 tags
Facebook By The Numbers
Via the Economist:
AFTER eight years, scores of lawsuits and a blockbuster movie, Facebook is going public. It is seeking to raise $5 billion from its initial public offering, which would give it an estimated market capitalisation of $80-100 billion—similar to that of fast-food chain McDonald’s. The social network employs only around 3,000 staff, giving it an average revenue of $1.2m per person...
3 tags
Charting Super Bowl History
Last night’s Super Bowl is one of only a few such contests held in the northern United States — all inside domed stadiums. This map shows the cities that hosted previous games and uses proportional symbols to show how many were played there:
Data source: Pro-football-reference.com
2 tags
WSJ Unemployment Tracker
The Wall Street Journal posted an interactive heat map to visualize the unemployment rate nationally over time. The backstory from the latest numbers:
Under the government’s definitions, people only count as unemployed when they’re actively looking for work. So when the unemployment rate drops, it could mean that unemployed people found jobs, or it could mean that they gave up looking for work....
3 tags
Charting Recessions and Recoveries
Amanda Cox from The New York Times charted the current downturn compared with history:
Horizontal axis shows months. Vertical axis shows the ratio of that month’s nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession. Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized with National Bureau of Economic Research’s...
FACEBOOK: Who uses it and what are they doing?
pewinternet:
On an average day:
15% of Facebook users update their own status.
22% comment on another’s post or status.
20% comment on another user’s photos.
26% “Like” another user’s content.
10% send another user a private message
A snapshot of sex/age distribution by social networking site platform:
43% of Facebook users are male and 58% are female.
33% of Facebook users are...
