By: Chris Amico, Danny DeBelius, Terrence Henry and Matt Stiles
Via: NPR

In 2011, Texas endured the worst single-year drought in its history. Now the state has to make some hard choices about how to prepare for future droughts and water shortages as its population and water demand grows. Learn about the drought’s progression and its impact on the state, explore the pros and cons of the policy decisions that need to be made and share your stories.


A DROUGHT OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS

The current drought began in October 2010. Though the situation has improved recently, the drought is far from over — and the conditions that caused it aren’t going away anytime soon.

Texas is a place susceptible to extreme weather, and the last year was no exception. Thousands of square miles were burned in wildfires, billions were lost in agriculture, and its impact could still linger in years to come.

The interactive map to the right shows how extreme drought conditions enveloped Texas, beginning in the early summer of 2010. The chart below shows how much of the state was under drought conditions over time. The slide show includes a timeline of how the drought affected Texans. Share your story.



FAR-REACHING EFFECTS

The drought’s impact has been severe, costing the state billions of dollars. These maps show where wildfires monitored by the Texas Forest Service spread last year, destroying homes and charring thousands of square miles.



 

POLICY RESPONSES

Various plans for dealing with future droughts and growing demand for water in Texas exist, but most comprehensive — and accepted — is the state Water Plan. It offers a frank assessment of the current landscape, saying Texas “does not and will not have enough water to meet the needs of its people, its businesses, and its agricultural enterprises.” It predicts that “if a drought affected the entire state like it did in the 1950s,” Texas could lose around $116 billion, over a million jobs, and the growing state’s population could actually shrink by 1.4 million people.

The water plan also offers a range of solutions for dealing with the problem, focusing mainly on conservation and efficiency, but also on building new reservoirs, tapping additional sources of water underground and treating effluent water. The biggest question, however is where the money will come from to pay for it. It has a price tag of $52 billion, or roughly $2,000 per Texan, through 2060. The state’s entire biennial budget for fiscal years 2012-2013 is just over $170 billion. Read more here.

via The Atlantic and NPR

Today, at least 90% of the country has a stove, electricity, car, fridge, clothes washer, air-conditioning, color TV, microwave, and cell phone. Take a moment to savor this graph from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century:

One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

– In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones

– In 1915, <10% of families owned a car

– In 1930, <10% of families owned a refrigerator or clothes washer

– In 1945, <10% of families owned a clothes dryer or air-conditioning

– In 1960, <10% of families owned a dishwasher or color TV

– In 1975, <10% of families owned a microwave

– In 1990, <10% of families had a cell phone or access to the Internet

In his final of 3 posts, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic notes: “In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away.” His first installment of this series followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. The second explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. The third is different because it goes beyond numbers, to include issues of quality of life and the question of progress: “It’s not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women’s ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.” (Believe it or not, the boom box was the fastest-adopted gadget of the last 50 years.)

Another piece from NPR traces the Birth of Silicon Valley. Now a well-known hotbed of innovation stretching along the peninsula southwest of San Francisco Bay, the story that emerges from this timeline is the transformative power of venture capital, as well as the onward march of technology. Click on the image below to explore the timeline.

By: Mark Wilson
Via: Co.DESIGN

USING ALGORITHMS, A TEAM OF STUDENTS ANALYZED THE CLUSTERS OF PLACES THAT LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE FLOCK TO.

Every city is filled with different neighborhoods, but often, you won’t find these places on any map. They’re word-of-mouth zoning distinctions known only to locals. The boundaries are vague and arbitrary, based as much upon the way people eat and dress as real estate prices and income per capita.

Yet if these areas are distinctive to city culture, is there a way that we could measure them and analyze them–map them–scientifically?


A team of students (Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz) and professors (Jason I. Hong and Norman Sadeh) from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Commerce Lab has done just that. Their research project is called Livehoods, which analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of ‘social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them,” the team tells Co.Design. “For example, if the algorithm notices that the people that visit a local bar are the same people that visit a nearby restaurant, these two places will be more likely to be grouped together.”
As more and more people and places are analyzed, Livehoods clusters this data into what becomes a collection [of] distinctive neighborhoods–places filled with people who enjoy going to the same restaurants, coffee shops, and music venues. And as calculating as the approach could seem, Livehoods’ scientific basis makes it extremely valuable as a social artifact: It defines local culture without the inherent judgement that comes along with human stereotyping.


With this scientific methodology in mind, the Livehoods team cross-checked their own findings of Pittsburgh with 27 resident interviews. What they found–the full results [of] which will be shared in a paper presented this June–was “compelling evidence” neighborhoods, as Livehood algorithms had defined them, had “real social meaning to people in the city.” In other words, the digital map lined up with many residents’ own mental maps.

All of this said, Livehoods aren’t a perfect snapshot of humanity just yet. The datasets mined for the project are limited by the perspective of Foursquare users. A lot of us don’t use Foursquare (with a strong skew toward older adults, most likely). “Our technique, however, is agnostic to the specific source of the data,” the team explains, “so as we get better, less biased sources of data, we should be able to produce more accurate views of the city.”

The young researchers also fear that we may take their boundaries a bit too literally. As much as Livehoods works to clarify invisible distinctions, the team, paradoxically, points out that these distinctions are more subtle than we might expect.

“In reality, neighborhoods tend to blend into one another,” they write. In which case, may I suggest a simple UI tweak? Maybe Livehoods should be rendered in gradients.

By:Nathan Yau
Via: FlowingData

An update to an interactive by Hannah Fairfield and Graham Roberts of The New York Times in 2010, making use of Mike Bostock’s Wealth & Health of Nations D3 port.

On average, women are still paid less than men for working comparable jobs. Is it getting better? Below shows how salaries between the genders have changed over the past nine years.


*Only occupations with data for all years and with at least 50,000 respondents for each sex are shown.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Via: Trace Media

Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualization of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa. For more information contact Gavin Baily or Mark Graham.

Before opening the map please note that some searches require a large download. For articles written in English try filtering the search by location e.g. Africa, Northern America, United Kingdom. Use the Stop button to cancel a search in progress.
We recommend using the latest version of Chrome, FireFox, Opera, IE or Safari. There’s Flash support for IE 7 and IE 8, but IE 9 or above is preferable.



The images below show the global distribution of articles written in each language.
















To further explore the geography of the data, each Wikipedia article is associated with various attributes, such as word count, number of authors, and number of images etc. You can investigate these using the ‘map’ dropdown. Here are a few examples for Europe, Asia and the US.




How it was built

The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim. http://flashcanvas.net/.

The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard:
http://v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html

To glue everything together we used jQuery. A big thankyou [sic] to the authors of the following libraries and plugins.
Eric Hynds’ UI MultiSelect Widget:
http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget/

Mike Chambers’ Quadtree for mouse-picking articles:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/03/21/javascript-quadtree-implementation/

Ben Alman’s BBQ library for storing URL hash values:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

Via: Hint.fm

Map as seen on April 10, 2012 5:00 pm EDT, top speed: 26.2 mph, average: 8.9 mph

Click image to be taken to a live interactive map.

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US.

Read more about wind and about wind power.