By Ted Burnham
Via: NPR


How healthy is your county?

To see how the place where you live stacks up against the rest of the U.S., check out the latest County Health Rankings, an annual report comparing health trends for more than 3,000 counties, plus the District of Columbia.

The rankings are produced by the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can drill down to look at, among other things, which areas have the highest and lowest education rates and income levels as well access to medical care and healthful foods.

Researchers say healthier counties have lower rates when it comes to things like smoking, physical inactivity, teen births, unemployment and violent crime — but they are no more likely than unhealthy counties to have lower rates of obesity, excessive drinking or greater access to better food options.

“The County Health Rankings show us that much of what influences our health happens outside of the doctor’s office. In fact, where we live, learn, work and play has a big role in determining how healthy we are and how long we live,” Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of RWJF, says in a press release. (The foundation provides financial support for NPR.)

Check out the map above showing the density of fast-food restaurants. There are 30 counties where 100 percent of the restaurants are fast-food, but in many of these cases there are only one or two restaurants in the county, Dr. Bridget Booske Catlin, deputy director of the study and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, writes in an email to Shots.

Among counties with more than 10 restaurants, these five counties had the most fast-food places — (in descending order) Scott County in Tennessee, Fayette County in Indiana, Letcher County in Kentucky, Charlton County in Georgia and Sanpete County in Utah. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of these counties were in the bottom half of overall health rankings within their respective states, according to Booske Catlin.

Compare that with this map showing premature death (darker spots indicate a higher incidence) and you can see where there’s overlap.

The researchers also found these regional health trends:

     • Northern states have the highest rates of excessive drinking.

     • Southern states have the highest rates of children living in poverty, teenage births, sexually transmitted infections.

     • Unemployment is lowest in states in the Northeast, Midwest and central plains.

     • Deaths from motor vehicle accidents are lowest in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

By: Mark Wilson
Via: Co.DESIGN

Our oceans are every bit as turbulent as “Starry Night.”



We imagine the ocean as having high tides and low tides, water that comes in and out in waves. Beyond that, how does water actually move around the world? What’s that flow look like?

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio assembled this remarkable animation of the surface currents of our oceans. It’s called Perpetual Ocean, and the full work is 20 minutes of HD video, assembled from a huge amount of satellite, on location, and computational data generated by ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase 2). ECCO2 itself exists to better understand our oceans and their role in the changing global climate.



What you’re looking at is the surface current flow (not anything deeper) of oceans around the world, recorded from 2006 to 2007. The white lines are the currents, and the darker blue colors of the water represent bathymetry (the fancy word for misnomer “ocean topography”).

The image is wondrous, isn’t it? I had no conception of how many massive whirlpools sit off the world’s coasts. It’s hard to imagine how difficult sea travel must have been to early explorers, trapped in currents without motors, relying only on wind, guts, and the stars to take them somewhere they’ve never seen before. Heck, it seems scary to undertake now.



And all this pontification is ignoring just how unthinkingly beautiful the visualization looks. NASA has rendered a picture of the ocean that’s as gorgeous as the ocean itself.

I find myself replaying the video embedded here, again and again, while Googling the locations of deeper currents to make sense of the surface repercussions I’m looking at. But the static references I discover–arrows pointing around continents–just aren’t the same. I’ve been spoiled by the complexity of this work. I don’t want to see nature simplified or snap-shotted. I just want to see it. I can notice the trends for myself.

By: Richard Florida
Via: The Atlantic Cities


Green jobs are often said to be a key growth area of the future. But according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 3.1 million people, 2.4 percent of all American workers, were employed in “green goods and services” jobs in 2010.

The report defines green jobs across five categories: production of energy from renewable sources; energy efficiency; pollution reduction and removal, greenhouse gas reduction, and recycling and reuse; natural resources conservation; and environmental compliance, education and training, and public awareness.

The majority of these green jobs (2.3 million) come from the private sector. The public sector employed about 860,000 people. The largest sector of employment was manufacturing, with more than 450,000 green jobs.

This squares with a July 2011 Brooking Institution study of clean economy jobs, which identified 2.7 million clean economy jobs across the United States. The report found that median wages for clean economy jobs are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages, and that a disproportionate share of clean economy jobs are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education. This has created a sizable group of “moderately well-paying green collar occupations,” according to the report.

My colleague Zara Matheson at Martin Prosperity Institute used the BLS data to map the distribution of green jobs across the 50 states and the District of Columbia.


The first map, above, shows the number of green jobs by state. Leading the way were six states with more than 100,000 green jobs. California take the top spot with 338,400, followed by New York (248,500), Texas (229,700), Pennsylvania (182,200), Illinois (139,800), and Ohio (126,900). But, of course, those are also some of the largest states, so it makes sense that they have the most green jobs overall.


The second map (above) charts the share of total employment comprised by green jobs across the states. Now, Vermont is the leader – green jobs make up 4.4 percent of its total employment. Green jobs make up more than 3 percent of total employment in D.C. (3.9 percent), Idaho (3.7 percent), Maryland (3.6 percent), Alaska (3.6 percent), Montana (3.5 percent), Oregon (3.4 percent), Colorado (3.3 percent), Washington (3.3 percent), Pennsylvania (3.3 percent), New York (3.0 percent) and Wyoming (3.0 percent).


The third map charts the the number of green goods and services jobs per thousand workers. Now, all-urban Washington, D.C., leads with 44.6 green jobs per thousand workers, followed by Vermont (20.6), Alaska (16.1), Maryland (15.1), Montana (14.7), and Oregon (14.3).

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look at the factors that might be associated with green jobs across states, including income and education levels as well as other economic variables. (The analysis is based on green jobs per thousand workers). As usual, I point out that correlation points only to associations and does not imply causality.

Green jobs are more prevalent in higher income states. There is a moderate correlation between green jobs and state median income (.4).

Green jobs are more closely associated with education or human capital levels. We found a correlation of .65 between green jobs and the share of college grads in state.

Green jobs are also more likely in states with knowledge-based and creative economies. We found a substantial correlation between green jobs and the share of creative class workers (.8) and a significant negative correlation between green jobs and the share of workers in blue-collar jobs (.6). Green jobs are not associated with the share of high-tech jobs in a state.

This analysis is interesting. It suggests that, though the green job sector is likely to grow, it is unlikely to provide a steady supply of lower-skill jobs or substantially bolster the economies or job markets of more heavily industrialized states.

As chock-full of data as the BLS report is, it does not report on green jobs at the metro level. For that we must turn to a database of green jobs built by the Brookings Institution (in partnership with the Battelle Corporation). Jose Lobo and Deborah Strumsky, both MPI research affiliates, have been granted access to the full Brookings database, and in collaboration with MPI research director, Kevin Stolarick, are preparing a detailed study of the geography of the green economy. We’ll be bringing you its results here.

By: Jacob Goldstein and Lam Thuy Vo
Via: NPR News

Let’s step back for a minute from the day-to-day news about jobs and unemployment and ask few bigger, simpler questions: What do Americans do for a living? And how has the picture changed over the past several decades?

We can answer those questions with two graphs.

What We Do For A Living
Breakdown of all U.S. jobs, as of 2012*
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

What We Used To Do For A Living
Breakdown of all U.S. jobs, as of 1972*
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Jobs where people make stuff for other people — manufacturing jobs — account for a much lower percentage of total jobs today. America still makes a lot of stuff in 2012, but technology means factories make more stuff with fewer people.

Jobs where people do stuff for other people — service jobs — account for a much higher percentage of total jobs. A particularly big gainer has been education and health services. This makes sense, given the huge rise in health spending as a percentage of total U.S. economy.

Jobs in government and wholesale and retail trade have held pretty steady. Those sectors were two of the top three in both 1972 and 2012.

A few, final notes on some of the details in this comparison:

In absolute terms, the number of jobs in America has risen from about 73 million in 1972 to 133 million today, primarily as a result of population growth. The percentage of Americans in the workforce is a also higher today than it was in 1972 (64 percent versus 60 percent).

Over time, some jobs have been re-categorized. New jobs that didn’t previously exist were thrown into the mix. But overall, the 12 major categories included in the charts above have remained the same.

We chose 1972 as the baseline, because that’s the earliest year for which this kind of apples-to-apples comparison was possible based on the BLS data. (You can find all of the historical data — in all its glorious detail — here.)

*The survey used to collect these data don’t include farm jobs (that’s why the big monthly jobs report is called “nonfarm payrolls.”) Farm jobs account for less than 1 percent of all jobs, according to the BLS.

Via: McKinsey Quarterly

Explore the cities and emerging urban clusters that will drive dramatic growth and demographic changes over the next generation.

Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth. Which of them will contribute the largest number of children or elderly to the world’s population? Which will see the fastest expansion of new entrants to the consuming middle classes? How will regional patterns of growth differ?

Explore these questions by browsing through the interactive global map below, which contains city-specific highlights from the McKinsey Global Institute’s database of more than 2,000 metropolitan areas around the world. (For assumptions underlying the data in this interactive, see sidebar, “Urban world uncertainties and assumptions.”) You’ll see why growth strategies focused at the country level may fall short in the future: with new hot spots emerging and household wealth surging in little-known urban centers, companies may have to adopt a much finer-grained approach to tap into the growth that lies ahead.

Global cities of the future
Explore the globe and view data on the dramatic urban growth expected by 2025.

It’s hard to comprehend how $3.7 trillion is divvied up among countless Federal agencies and programs. To better understand President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have created helpful interactive data visualizations.

The New York Times slices the data four ways: All Spending; Types of Spending; Changes; and Department Totals. Clicking from one view to the next creates an animated tour of the budget. Scroll over each circle to see which department is gaining or losing funds.

All Spending


Changes


Department Totals

The Washington Post uses boxes to show both revenue and spending. Click on a box to see trends in each category since 1981.