Category Data and Empirical Tools

When I think of national elections, I think of a map of the United States colored in red and blue, and sometimes shades of purple. This past super Tuesday the GOP primary results were often illustrated with a map. Most news agencies and other interested organization have made their primary and election prediction maps available on the web. (See a short list below.)

Many of the maps like the PBS Newshours VOTE 2012 Map Center maps, not only have shaded maps but also give county by county vote counts. While the maps are great about showing the difference in urban vs. non-urban votes and regional votes, they certainly serve as reminders that geographic expanse in not an accurate indicator of where a state’s voters are concentrated. For example, if you look at the Newhours’ Ohio super Tuesday map, it is mostly blue (69 out of 88 counties are blue). Blue indicates that Rick Santorum received the most votes in that county. However, Santorum did not win Ohio. Mitt Romney, with a mere 19 counties shaded orange, won Ohio.

If you are interested in exit poll information, go to the MSNBC’s election coverage state data pages. The exit poll information is not displayed as a map, but detailed data is given. In Ohio the marjority of polled voters aged 49 years and younger voted for Santorum, while voters over 49 favored Romney.

CNN’s America’s Choice 2012

• GOP Delegate Calculator (Interactive map where you predict which candidate will win)
• 2012 Prediction (CNN’s best estimate)

Fox News’ Candidate Tracker

• Tells you where candidates are on their campaign trail

MSNBC’s Decision 2012

• Data:  National Results have no map
• Data: Choose a state – Ohio – has a state maps (they also give exit poll information.)

PBS Newshour VOTE 2012 Map Center

• Live Resutls (GOP Primary and Caucs Results)
• Past Results (GOP Primary and Caucs Results)
• 2012 Prediction (Interactive map where you predict which party will win)

The United States Census Bureau blog, Random Samplings, showcases Census Bureau experts. Entries discuss the objects of their work and explain census and survey results. Some of the categories covered by past blogs include poverty, genealogy, education, and data tools.

Blog posts about data tools have included: discussion of the redesigned Census Bureau homepage, Visualizing Income and Poverty Estimates, and What are census blocks?. Most of the posts lead you to more information; such as press releases, other blogs, or visualization and other Census Bureau tools.

You may get new posts by email or by subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed.  There are also links which allow users to share posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. If you prefer to comment directly, there is a way to do that as well.

I watched the “The Joy of Stats.” It was joyous as advertised; I laughed out loud several times. Hans Rosling notes that more and more data is being made available, for example San Francisco has created a data site DataSF. Not only is there a lot of data on this site — there are visualization tools. Several tools have been created for the San Francisco Police data. The SFPD is also one of the police departments that shares crime data on the CrimeReports.com site.

CrimeReports uses icons to represent crime categories on a Google Map. This site gives you several ways to display the data. The Google map features allow you to move around the map and zoom in and out.  You can choose which of the different crime categories are displayed. If you click on an icon you get specific information about the incident such as address and time of day. You can also choose a date range, such as just yesterday (yes, the data is current and udated daily). This information can be used to see patterns of crimes to help police departments, community watch groups, and individuals. Individual users can receive email alerts about crimes occurring near their home or work or wherever in the city.

CrimeReports display many jurisdictions’ crime data. Unfortunately Cleveland crimes are not plotted, but Lakewood Police Department crime data is.

Graph of life expectancy, income, and country size.

Gapminder is a data visualization tool. I saw it first on this Newshour story about Hans Rosling, who uses it to inform people about global health, population, and development statistics. (Note to the squeamish — the video ends with sword swallowing.) To get an idea of what this tool can do, watch “2000 countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes“.

If you want to use the tool yourself, you can.  Gapminder World allows you to put different indicators on the X and Y axes and to determine what the size of the circle represents. You can also select how many countries you wish to view and whether or not to have a trail that shows the path a country travels  (or multiple countries travel) over time. There is a Gapmider World Guide and a tutorial to help you use the tool. There is also a list of the indicators in Gapminder World where you can find information on the provider and download the data. Note, the data in the “2000 countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes” is the preset data in Gapminder World.

If you are interested in world health issues, there are several other videos that you may find interesting such as “Lung Cancer Statistics” or “Reducing Child Mortality.”  The next video I plan to watch is “The Joy of Stats.”

This has been a rather skimpy snow season, Cleveland’s mean snowfall for October through December is 15 inches. The National Operations Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center is the NOAA’s source for information about snow. The site not only houses data about snow, it also has a number of interactive maps and snowfall probability forecasts. The Snow Depth map can be animated to show the snow depths day by day for the season, two weeks, or just a specific day.  According to the snow forecast for the next 3 days we should not expect 4 or more inches of snow.  In October NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) released is annual Winter Outlook. It predicts cooler temperatures and more precipitation for our area from December 2011 – February 2012, so maybe we will make up for the lack of snow this January and February.

The National Climate Data Center has a site dealing with Snow Climatology, where you can find out information about the extremes.  For example, according to the Ohio Snowfall and Snow Depth Extremes Table, the Ohio location with the greatest (35 inches) daily snow depth is Ashtabula.  But, Chardon has the greatest monthly snowfall total (69.5 inches).