Estimating The Boundaries Of College Football Fandom. NY Times Article.

The NY Times published an article that uses Facebook “likes” by zip code to map out college football loyalty.  It’s interesting to see how the mapped data shows whole states where one college dominates while some states are carved up into niches.  Check out what team your neighbors are rooting for.

The Best American Wall Map Ever Made?

An Oregon cartographer by the name of David Imus spent 6,000 hours to create an absolutely brilliant wall map of the US. He places labels in ways that are useful and easy to read (no algorithms used). Imus captured important bits of info that are generally ignored like ferry routes and his attention to detail is amazing. I’m hoping to be able to purchase one in the future.

Read Slate’s article on the map here.

Where We Came From and Where We are Going.

The NY times recently released an article looking at how Census data gives us insight into migrations patterns in the US. For each state you see the following information: where people from that home state have moved to and where they have moved from (by decade starting with the 1990 census and ending with the 2012 American Community Survey).  Within each of these migration patterns the data highlights what specific parts of the country people are coming from/leaving to.  For example, Florida’s data illustrates that in 1900 65% of Floridians were born in the state compared to just 36% in 2012.  The majority of the new migrants came from NY and other Northeastern states.   The out migration data shows that the majority of Florida residents have moved to other parts of the state, with other states in the South being the second destination.

The NY times did a great job visualizing the data into colored streams that are easy to understand.  The newspaper typically does a great job taking complex data and reformatting it for easy digestion.

Here’s  a link to the article:

Repost: How to write a business plan in one week.

This afternoon I came across this post from the blog “The Daily Positive”. The author is a speaker and entrepreneur who blogs about social media, positivity and business. I thought that this post on “Writing a Business Plan in a Week” was informative and concise. He shares a data visualization from the Washington State University that I plan on sharing when I am out teaching about data and business plans.

Coming Soon: Review of Tableau Public version 8.2

One of the things that I have been meaning to work is visualizing data for this blog. I am a visual person and I find it easier to look at a graph or map than stare at a report. Luckily, there are a lot of sites that cater to the data visualization crowd. The one that I plan on testing is called Tableau Public (the free one) version is 8.2.  Tableau is a data visualization software that allows you to use Excel spreadsheets, Access databases or text files to produce charts, graphs and maps that can be added to the web.  I have yet to try it out.  I am still at the stage of watching the introductory YouTube videos.  Once I get it up and running, I’ll post my progress under the Projects portion on the blog.  If you have used Tableau before please feel free to leave a comment.  I’d love to hear the plus and minuses of your experience.