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).

Computational Legal Studies (blog), in partnership with the Michigan State University College of Law and Emory Law School, has released (in “Beta Pre-Release”) an intriguing tool to search and map/chart the use of short-phrases in judicial opinions.

The web interface allows a user to instantly view a time series plot for one or several phrases. Comparing the use of legal terms of art over time can be both entertaining and informative.

The current version indexes the language from every decision of the United States Supreme Court from 1791-2005. The announcement on the Computational Legal Studies blog states plans to add other bodies of case law, specifically mentioning the federal Courts of Appeal.

This is one of the recent examples we’ve seen of empirical scholars releasing creative front-end tools for data collected to advance their own scholarship. In this case, the short multi-authored paper “Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language” describes the collection of the data and use of the plotting tool, and points the way toward evaluating the data set to explore actual patterns of judicial influence and legal evolution by tracking the adoption of development of legal language.

Katz, Daniel Martin, Bommarito, Michael James, Seaman, Julie, Candeub, Adam and Agichtein, Eugene, “Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language” (December 13, 2011). Proceedings of JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Vienna 2011.
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1971953

Claremont McKenna College’s Rose Institute has made a database of information about ballot initiatives across the 50 states available online. The data was gathered by Ken Miller (J.D., Ph.D.) of the colleges’ Department of Government.

This is a tool targeted mainly toward Political-Science-style empirical study of initiatives. The web portal to the data can be sorted by state, general subject-matter, ballot number, or year. This is a pretty limited tool for conventional legal research into the contents, meaning, or interpretation of law enacted through the initiative process in a particular jurisdiction. The ability to group by general topic does provide a quick way to know about comparable out-of-state initiatives to research further.

But the site seems really interesting as a tool to study the contours of the initiative process and study the use of state-wide initiatives across time or across states. Most interestingly, the database gathers information on post-election challenges to successful ballot initiatives; providing the court jurisdiction and citation, outcome, and a short summary of the basis for the decision.

The website itself is also interesting as an example of the pros and cons of “off-the-shelf,” cloud-based, web tools. It is built in Zoho Creator, which bills itself as a “non-programmer friendly” tool for building database applications. And it appears this was in fact used as a ‘quick and cheap’ way to get the data out without design or development infrastructure. As for the result, I would deem it clunky but (mostly) functional.

(Site spotted via Due Process: The Georgetown Law Library Blog).

Roughly 75% of the people living in Ohio were born in Ohio, according to the Census Bureau’s November American Community Survey Briefs: “Lifetime Mobility in the United States: 2010.” If we look at the United States as a whole, 59% of the population is living where it was born. About 79% of Louisiana’s population was born there, while only 24% of Nevada’s population was born in the state. Of course, with a population increase of 35%, Nevada has also gained the most in terms of population since 2000, according to the 2010 Census information.

The brief also looks at age and mobility. Those under the age of 5 are the most likely to be living in the state in which they were born (89%), while those ages 65 – 74 are the least likely (47%). Interestingly, however, 65% of the oldest Midwesterners-by-birth are living in the Midwest, but only 25% of the oldest Westerners-by-birth are living in the West.

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a nationwide survey of about 3 million addresses. The purpose is to provide timely social, economic, and demographic data about the nation, states, counties, and other locations.  Other American Community Survey Briefs include, “Labor Force Participation Rate for Selected Age Groups: 2008 and 2009,” “Science and Engineering Degrees: 2009,” and “Same-Sex Couple Households.”