Where Does Your State Reside In The Well-Being Index?

This time Mississippi didn't get last! Instead, for this particular survey, the 'sippi sits in third to last while West Virginia takes the bottom spot. Hawaii reigns supreme.

From January - December 2010, Gallup conducted surveys and used the data to form a well-being index, an index comprised of sub-indexes based on life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors and basic access. The results are based on 352,840 phone interviews with adults 18 or over. Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, cell phone-only status, cell phone-mostly status, and phone lines.

The results follow mostly along the lines of what you'd expect: Southern states sit in 5 of the bottom 10 spots for well-being while Western states have 5 in the top 10. Vermont and Massachusetts scored highest in the healthy behaviors and basic access categories, respectively. The whole release is here. Drill down on as much data as you'd like.

200 Years, 200 Countries in 4 Minutes

Interesting visualization of health, income, and population over the last 200 years.

Radar Update

The most important kind of data

DATA!!!

Now that I have your attention, take a look at all of this sweet data!

The US Census Bureau has released its data and you can check out some amazing demographic and ethnographic stuff. Screen shot below, get DEEP with it here. Seriously, highest recommendation I can bestow.

Here's NYC:



And here's Cambridge, MA:

How the smartphone market breaks down

If this interests you, then this is really cool data. Check out the major market share battle that RIM (Blackberry) and Apple have going on. And oh, by the way, Android is also closing the gap. This is all good for the consumer.



Read more here.

Wondering about foreclosures in your area?

Look no further than Google maps. You can search Google maps for Real Estate and then click the "foreclosures" box to sort by foreclosure properties. Below is a screenshot of the DC area. That's a lot of flags:



via chartporn.org

Mapping the US by Google auto-suggest search terms

Click the image to view in full, pretty interesting to see how dominant football is.

Jobs. Data. '80s.

Trifecta

Holy smokes! Check out this data

From YouTube's blog, the number of HOURs of video uploaded every MINUTE (that's a whole lot)

When are most people breaking up?

One guy analyzed Facebook data to examine the most common dates, time periods and days for breaking up. Below is the visualization:



A couple of highlights:

* A big peak right before Spring Break
* Most breakups are announced on Mondays
* People like to start the summer being single
* A big peak right before Christmas
* The lowest day throughout the whole year is Christmas Day (thank God)

Thanks to Chartporn.org

Infographic Maps Cities By Race Of Citizens

From Cartographer, Bill Rankin, comes a very cool data visualization. Below is Chicago, click the image to view it in full and note the key. It shows how Chicago's neighborhoods break out by the race of people living in them. Fascinating stuff. New York and Detroit below.



Here's New York, racial divisions are no joke in the Big Apple:



And here is Detroit...note the way it breaks out in proximity to the infamous "8 mile" beltway.

How Much Do These Jumps in Web Traffic Say Fall is Coming?

The following is data from Compete.com (a representative panel of online users and the properties they visit). This is a list of sites that had the largest move in unique monthly visitors in August:

Visual DATA

Great chart showing various computer models’ projections for the potential path of Earl. These models were as of earlier this morning.

Real "Minority Report" - esque crime fighting technologies

Remember "Minority Report" where former actor and current cult meeting attendee, Tom Cruise (sp?), would bust crimes before they happened using sweet sweet technology and the ESP powers of bald people dipped in goo?

Here's a great article from Fast Company that highlights some of the current technologies being used that aren't far from what was seen in the movie (just a sample; click here for the full article):

Blue CRUSH (best name!): IBM's new Blue Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History (CRUSH) programs feels almost directly inspired by Minority Report. Similar to the "precogs," IBM's new system uses "predictive analytics," mining years and years of incident reports and law enforcement data to "forecast criminal 'hot spots.'" Police in Memphis have already had great success with the $11-billion "precrime" predicting tool: Since installing Blue CRUSH, the city has seen a 31% drop in serious crime.

Drones (not just for aerial bombings anymore): A bill circling the House of Representatives aims to legalize unmanned aerial vehicles to fly over domestic skies for enhanced border security and oil pipeline monitoring. British units are already using UAVs to keep watch of its citizens, which would perhaps raise more questions over privacy violations if London wasn't already chock-full of CCTV cams.

OnStar: In the film, all vehicles are auto-piloted along tracks and can be controlled by law enforcement. When scanners detect a wanted criminal entering a car, police can automatically pull the vehicle over. Looks like this directly inspired OnStar's Stolen Vehicle Slowdown technology. The system enables customers and police to locate a stolen car using GPS, depower the vehicle, and watch as it glides to safety along the side of the road, ending any chance for a high speed chase. Did I mention OnStar even force-locks the doors until police can arrive?

Hang onto your butts, the future's here.

Total yearly executions by country

From the Economist:

CHINA executes more of its own citizens than any other country, and more than all others in the world combined. “Thousands” of Chinese were executed in 2009 according to Amnesty International's annual study, which states that an exact number is impossible to determine because information on the death penalty is regarded as a state secret.

Burgernomics: The Big Mac Index

To the left is a chart from the Economist that shows the relative cost of a hamburger in a number of different countries. Having been to Norway, I'm in now way surprised to see it top the list. Still, in a country where a single beer costs upwards of $17, the $7.20 prices actually seems reasonable.

Of course this is the Economist and fun isn't had without a more serious point being made:

The index is a lighthearted attempt to gauge how far currencies are from their fair value. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), which argues that in the long run exchange rates should move to equalise the price of an identical basket of goods between two countries. Our basket consists of a single item, a Big Mac hamburger, produced in nearly 120 countries. The fair-value benchmark is the exchange rate that leaves burgers costing the same in America as elsewhere.

A tour of the world's depths

From The Times...click the image to see it in full screen.

More data coming at ya!

This is cool and makes we actually want to pay for more music...

3-D Crime Data

Hello all, apologies for my recent hiatus from posting. As a conversation went with a Snipes yesterday, "Dude, real life is the worst" "Yeah, big time."

Anyway, below is some cool stuff. 3-D imaging of crime statistics for the city of San Francisco.



Sourced from here.