Super sweet Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
Growing Education Divide in Cities
College graduates are more unevenly distributed in the top 100 metropolitan areas now than they were four decades ago. More adults have bachelor’s degrees, but the difference between the most and least educated metro areas is double what it was in 1970.
How Google Collected Data From Wi-Fi Networks - Graphic - NYT
Notable:
- The bottom-left point about geolocating routers is fascinating, considering costs and speed but how ‘fixed’ are routers given their shoddy shelf-life?
- For those who don’t password-protect their wifi signals, I’m curious if there’s a change in content captured and if *google* would be curious about it (also, wouldn’t it be polluted by neighboring freeloaders?)
The Most Popular Month for Birthdays
Amitabh Chandra, a professor of public policy at the Harvard University, earlier published a data table detailing how many babies were born in the United States on each date between 1973 and 1999. September 16th happens to be the most common birthday while December 25th is the least popular birthday
Matt Stiles, data journalist at NPR, converted this NYT table into a static heatmap for easy visualization (the darker the color, the higher the probability of births happening on that date) and Andy Kriebel made an interactive heatmap of the same data using Tableau – this version lets you hover over any cell and you can see the underlying data.
Student Debt at Colleges and Universities Across the Nation
The average amount of debt that students have at graduation has increased at a vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States, according to data compiled by an advocacy group, the Institute for College Access and Success. The data on student debt is self-reported by the schools, and many institutions don’t participate. Other figures, like graduation rates, come from the Education Department.
We know that the New York Times are infographics geniuses. They visualize data to track sentiment on a topic, while inviting you to participate in the conversation or even start a new one. Sorting features allow you to find “your people” and compare ideas.
One of the best things about working at a newspaper is that you can come into work and do something different every day. Yesterday I had planned on spending the day doing some longer-term work in preparation for the Olympics and generally phoning it in Friday-style when a handful of us got…
Three Years of Kickstarter Projects
Almost 50,000 projects have sought financing on Kickstarter since the site began on April 28, 2009. About half successfully reached their fund-raising goals. Each dot represents how much a project raised by its deadline. Active projects are shown as of 5:30 p.m. Friday.
The New York Times, in collaboration with the New York University Movement Lab, explains music conducting in this beautifully produced video. It’s part interview with Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, and part rendering of motion capture data, which represents Gilbert’s conducting.
To capture the data, the Movement Lab installed high-speed motion capture cameras, and Gilbert put on one of those funny-looking suits with the sensor balls on them. He conducted, and they recorded his body and his hands.
Geography of government benefits
I missed this one a while back, but The New York Times had a look at the growth of government benefit programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in the United States. On the surface, it looks like your standard choropleth map that shows percent of income from government benefits, but there’s a lot going on here that makes the piece really good.
Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal
A slightly hallucinogenic interactive from the New York Times.
Images: Screenshots of the New York Times infographic on President Obama’s budget proposal. Green indicates an increase in spending. Red indicates a decrease. Shown here are the overall budget, changes in discretionary spending and budgets by department.
![Comparing the Fundraising Performance of the US Presidential Candidates
The NYTimes released a competitive dashboard of sorts, titled “The 2012 Money Race: Compare the Candidates” [nytimes.com]. Basically, the interactive graphic allows readers to contrast the various performance parameters in terms of fundraising from 2 presidential candidates next to each other. Another recent graphic [nytimes.com] lists the hundreds of organizations and people that fund the so-called Super PACs that are officially not controlled by those very candidates.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyrv0mjwxb1qhn3smo1_1280.jpg)
The NYTimes released a competitive dashboard of sorts, titled “The 2012 Money Race: Compare the Candidates” [nytimes.com]. Basically, the interactive graphic allows readers to contrast the various performance parameters in terms of fundraising from 2 presidential candidates next to each other. Another recent graphic [nytimes.com] lists the hundreds of organizations and people that fund the so-called Super PACs that are officially not controlled by those very candidates.
Then as Now — New York’s Shifting Ethnic Mosaic
A century ago, Israel Zangwill popularized the term in his play, “The Melting Pot.” New York has evolved into a greater crucible of race and ethnicity today than it was back then, but the city also remains very much a mosaic — a variegated montage of neighborhoods in which certain groups predominate.
Selected words used by President Obama in his State of the Union addresses, and by Republican presidential candidates in their debates, television interviews and major speeches since May.
Since the start of the presidential campaign, independent groups have spent at least $29.7 million asking voters to elect or defeat candidates through television advertisements and other means. The most active groups have been “super PACs,” which can raise unlimited money from individuals, corporations and labor unions. Although these groups cannot legally be tied to a candidate, several of the most-active ones are run or advised by former associates or campaign staff; those are noted below with the picture of the candidate.
