Diabetes belt in the USA

This graphic image shows the incidence of diabetes in the USA where an estimated 18 million now have the disease. It is based on county level data. In the darkest parts of the map over 11% have been diagnosed as discussed in this Scientific American article. Given the swathe it cuts across the south, it could perhaps be called a "Grits belt".
It would be very interesting to see a similar graph for Ireland. I don't know if that is possible.

Data visualization and development indicators

If you are interested in economic development, cross-country comparisons and data visualization this new facility from the World Bank is useful.

And to complete the toolkit a new stata module WBOPENDATA draws from the main World Bank collections of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources, and made available through the World Bank Open Data Initiative, and presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates.
User's can download WBOPENDATA directly from within Stata by typing

ssc install wbopendata

Hat-tips to David Madden & Olivier Bargain respectively.

The bright side of life expectancy?

This is a nice graph which illustrates effectively the variation in male life expectancy: how many years a newborn baby boy can currently expect to live.
Actually, no, its a horrible graph because it shows that in many parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, people don't live much beyond 40, about half what we can expect in rich countries.
For the raw data & the graph for females see here.

Visualising Mortality - Hans Rosling

Doing the rounds on the blogworld - quite brilliant!

Google Fusion Tables: Share and discuss your data online

While Google's Fusion Tables may not appeal to professional researchers who are conscious of data-security, there are some useful features which may appeal to beachelor's and master's students working on group projects. These include:

- Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files.
- Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts.
- Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed.
- Merge data from multiple tables.
- Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions.

Insight on U.S. Unemployment Trends

Tomorrow (or today, Irish time) sees the release of U.S. employment figures, which are expected to show a marginal increase in unemployment. Readers may be interested in visualising U.S. unemploymnent trends (by state, since 1990) using the new offering by "Google Public Data", as shown in the chart above. "Google Public Data" is discussed on the Google Research Blog here. The chart (above) shows Michigan, California, Louisiana, Vermont, and the U.S. average. (Misissippi is not shown though it follows a similar trend to Louisiana).

Of note, both Louisiana and California had above-average unemployment before 2000; but Michigan has fared relatively worse over the last decade. How did it go so wrong for Michigan when Louisiana (and Misissipi) and California previously suffered from the highest unemployment rates? This is a question that may see labour-economists swopping notes with trade-theorits and geographers.

Though Louisiana-State trends closely to Califorinia, Louisiana has a notable unemployment spike in 2005-2006, which corresponds to Hurricane Katrina (see some notes on Louisiana here). Despite an employment boost since Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana trends towards the national unemployment rate since summer 2008 (i.e. financial crisis). (Misissippi was also affected by Katrina but is omitted from the chart for reasons of parsimony).

Michigan's situation over the course of the last year is quite striking; the slope function of the state's unemployment increase is very steep. The outstanding (policy) question is: what is to be done about unemployment in Michigan; right now? From a research perspective, what can we learn from the 2005-06 unemployment shocks in Louisiana and Misissipi?

Stats Cool Graphs

Thanks to Olivia Joyner for sending on a link to GapMinder.org. Their mission statement is "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view."

Visualisation of the Live Register Gender Gap in Ireland

Here is a visualistion of the gender gap in the Live Register (right up to May '09), courtesy of Status Ireland. Males are shown as the blue line, coming onto the register at a much faster pace than females since last summer.

Yale Geocon project

The Yale Geocon project has been around a while but i have just seen these graphs as someone pointed them out to me.

http://gecon.yale.edu/

Have a look at the link that says pixeled contour globe - what a really interesting way of looking at data