Looks like Gavin Newsom is going to comfortably avoid being recalled. But for a while there the polls indicated a close race. One poll especially caused panic among the Governor's backers: a SurveyUSA poll released on August 4th that showed the Yes vote leading 51-40%. Some other polls at the time showed a close result, … Continue reading How You Ask a Question Matters
Crowded, or not
[As usual for these map-based posts, the bigger your screen, the better.] I'll continue the analysis of building and census data that I started in my previous post. Today I introduce a new metric, which determines how close together buildings are in a given census tract. For each building in a tract, we measure how … Continue reading Crowded, or not
The Ways We Live
Today I'm going to combine two data sets that I've worked with before. One is the Microsoft building database (yep, I just can't quit it!). The other is the US Census housing data, at the census tract level. Merging these two data sets provides a look at the different ways we've built up this vast … Continue reading The Ways We Live
Voting and Vaccination
Back in April, the New York Times published an article about the correlation between 2020 presidential voting and Covid-19 vaccination rates. They found that the more a state or county voted for Trump, the lower the vaccination rate. Today I'll do an update, using recent data. Not surprisingly, the correlation is still there. The amount … Continue reading Voting and Vaccination
A Slightly Shorter Hike
My previous post determined that there was no way to travel across the US on an west-east parallel without encountering a building (in fact, you'll run into hundreds of them). Today we'll figure out if there's a north-south line of longitude (or, meridian) that avoids man-made structures. At first glance, it seems more likely. There … Continue reading A Slightly Shorter Hike
A Long Hike
[If you're reading this in email, I recommend following the link above to read it in a web browser. Some of the maps below won't display correctly in an email. I also recommend reading this on a PC - a large screen makes viewing the maps easier.] Imagine you're standing somewhere on the west coast … Continue reading A Long Hike
COVID – It Ain’t Over Yet
There are all sorts of graphs showing the progression of COVID. We've all seen graphs that show the number of COVID deaths over time. There's a lot of variation, depending on the state and/or country. This makes sense - different regions were hit in different ways. So, New York, the early epicenter in the US: … Continue reading COVID – It Ain’t Over Yet
Visualizing Where We are From
As I mentioned in my previous post, the US Census place-of-birth data is available at the census tract level. Wouldn't it be nice to visualize this, by looking at a map of a state? And be able to zoom down to cities and neighborhoods, and see the differences from tract to tract? Well, now you … Continue reading Visualizing Where We are From
Where We are From
Today we're going to look at the same Census place-of-birth data as my earlier post. But this time, instead of looking at the state level, we'll drill down to something called a Census Tract. A census tract is a small, usually permanent geographical division. Typically their population ranges between 1,200 and 8,000, with an optimum … Continue reading Where We are From
Binned Heatmaps
The New York Times has a lot of good COVID info; one of their pages tracts the vaccine rollout rate per state. Here's today's graph: This is known as a 'heatmap' - it uses colors to differentiate the values of the regions (here, states). In this case, it's a 'binned' heatmap - the map uses … Continue reading Binned Heatmaps