Robert Groves, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, on the Appropriations Bill:

The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

A lot of the negative comments following the post are from people who have never used Census data, or any substantial amount of data for that matter, and have no clue how a dataset can feed into a model to make other estimates. Then there's the people who don't want to answer questions about their toilets. I wonder what their Facebook profiles look like.

Princeton history graduate student Benjamin Schmidt explores changes in language through TV anachronisms. In Schmidt's most recent analysis, he examines Megan's use of "callback" in the last episode of Mad Men. Above is the ratio of modern use to period use. Notice callback sticking out in the top left.

The big one from the charts: Megan gets "a callback for" an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word "callback" is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and "callback for" is even worse. The OED doesn't have any examples of a theater-oriented use of "callback" until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn't really suite Megan's generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff's lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. "call-back" and "call back" don't seem much more likely.

Other anachronisms include the use of "pay phone" and a frequent use of "on the phone with" which didn't peak until the 1970s.

Don't miss the look into Downton Abbey anachronisms. Also, more details from Schmidt on his methodology.

[via Revolutions]

Music visualization with stop motion board games. You can't go wrong.

[via @jcukier]

Jerzy Wieczorek, a statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau, explains why the American Community Survey is worthwhile.

Besides the direct estimates from the ACS itself, the Census Bureau uses ACS data as the backbone of several other programs. For example, the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program provides annual data to the Department of Education for use in allocating funds to school districts, based on local counts and rates of children in poverty. Without the ACS we would be limited to using smaller surveys (and thus less accurate information about poverty in each school district) or older data (which can become outdated within a few years, such as during the recent recession). Either way, it would hurt our ability to allocate resources fairly to schoolchildren nationwide.

Similarly, the Census Bureau uses the ACS to produce other timely small-area estimates required by Congressional legislation or requested by other agencies: the number of people with health insurance, people with disabilities, minority language speakers, etc. The legislation requires a data source like the ACS not only so that it can be carried out well, but also so its progress can be monitored.

Last month Republicans were pushing a bill to get rid of the American Community Survey, an 11-page questionnaire about housing, education, and other things. Yesterday, a bill passed to cut the survey in a 232 to 190 vote.

Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.

"It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution," said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.

"This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars," Webster added. "It's the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It's the picture of what's wrong in Washington, D.C. It's unconstitutional."

The ACS is the picture of what's wrong in Washington? This is idiocy.

Thanks to the Internet Archive and CNN, thirteen years of transcripts, about a gigabyte compressed, is available to download as one file.

For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.

Changes in news coverage and CNN's focus over the years, anyone?

[via @A_L]

Gay rights vary across states and by region. The Guardian US interactive team does their research and shows this variance, covering several issues, from school to marriage. Segmented concentric circles make the foundation of the interactive where each circle is an issue, and each segment is a state. The states are organized by region, so it's easy to see where areas of the country stand.

Be sure to scroll down for regional breakdowns by issue.

Nice work from both a technical and storytelling standpoint.

The series premiere of United Stats of America (See what they did there?) on History is tonight at 10/9c.

Episodes explore the stats that help us understand how much money we make (and what we spend it on), how long we will live (and how we will die), what we do with our free time (and how to make more of it) and a whole lot more. In one episode, the Sklars explain how the deadliest animal in America is neither the snake nor the shark but rather the deer. In another, viewers learn that Americans waste 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic and that, in a nation with over 3.5 million square miles of territory, 99 percent of us are crowded into only 8 percent of the land.

I watched a couple of clips and got bored quickly as they went through a bunch of numbers. It seems like a rehash of Yahoo and Huffington Post lists with jokes. I'm setting my expectations low, but maybe there'll be more to it in the full episodes.

[Thanks, Gary]

Researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University investigate the structure of cities in Livehoods, using foursquare check-ins.

The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquare check-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale.

It's most interesting when you click on location dots. A Livehood is highlighted and a panel on the top right tells you what the neighborhood is like, related neighborhoods, and provides stats like hourly and daily pulse and a breakdown location categories (for example, food and nightlife). Does foursquare have anything like this tied into their system? They should if they don't.

There's only maps for San Francisco, New York City, and Pittsburgh right now, but I'm sure there are more to come.

Want more on the clustering behind the maps? Here's the paper [pdf].

Welcome to Anthropocene:

Scientific concepts like the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and planetary stewardship have heralded a profound shift in perception of our place in the world: a growing evidence base of scientific observations show we have become the prime driver of global environmental change. These new concepts are powerful communication tools as we move towards global sustainability.

There's also a non-narrated version, but I like the narration. It helps you better appreciate what you're seeing. Oh yeah, and ooohh, purdy.

[via infosthetics]

I've never played Minecraft, but maybe this map showing live server connections means something to those who do. "A dot is a server or a client. Lines are traced from clients connecting to servers. Lone dots are local servers." They also have raw hardware data available for download. [Thanks, Erik]

With the Titanic anniversary this year, Chiqui Esteban dug up graphics back from the time of the event. This one showing the time to cross the Atlantic is the best. "If only we could fly the Atlantic!"

With The Avengers coming out today in the US, artist Jer Thorp had a look at character appearances, of which there have been 127 since 1963.

We can see a big cluster of major Avengers appearing in the first few episodes, with some other big names coming in the next few years (Vision, the Avenger with the 3rd most appearances in issues, doesn't come along until #57). While there are a couple of major additions along the way (She-Hulk & Photon in 1982), we can see that the cast of characters for the team is defined pretty early.

See Thorp's post for additional categorizations such as gender balance and robot characters. Best enjoyed in high resolution.

I've been reading papers on how people learn statistics (and thoughts on teaching the subject) and came across the frequently-cited work of mathematical psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In 1972, they studied statistical misconceptions. It doesn't seem much has changed. Joan Garfield (1995) summarizes in How to Learn Statistics [pdf].
Continue Reading

A while back, Robert Kosara and Caroline Ziemkiewicz shared their work on Parallel Sets, a way to visually explore categorical data. Software developer, Jason Davies, just ported the technique to Data-Driven Documents (D3). The interactions for sorting and rearranging are similar to the Kosara and Ziemkiewicz version, but the D3 version of course runs in the browser and has some nifty transitions. Try toggling the show curves box and the icicle plot one.

Glaciers are big, slow-moving objects, and it might seem that not much is happening if you stare at one for a while. The Extreme Ice Survey, founded by James Balog in 2007, aims to provide the ice with a "visual voice" using time-lapse photography.

One aspect of EIS is an extensive portfolio of single-frame photos celebrating the beauty–the art and architecture–of ice. The other aspect of EIS is time-lapse photography; currently, 27 cameras are deployed at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour, year-round during daylight, yielding approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. We edit the time-lapse images into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet.

Some of the videos span four years, from 2007 to 2011, and it's amazing to see the sped-up dynamic of the ice. I like this one, which Balog refers to as the cat's paw. It looks like a big paw of ice reaching into the ocean.

[via Boing Boing]

Doghouse Diaries maps bed regions. I relate to this. [Thanks, Robert]

PhD student Adrien Friggeri demonstrates a new clustering algorithm with a visualization of the agreement groups within the United States Senate over time.

As you might imagine, there are two obvious groupings, Republican and Democrat. It gets interesting though when you look at Democrats classified as Republicans and vice versa. For example, the 11 Republicans placed in the Democratic group of the 110th Congress:

Most of whom are either moderates or closer to the Democrats than to their own party. Charles Hagel was critic of the Bush Administration which he described as "the lowest in capacity, in capability, in policy, in consensus — almost every area" of any presidency in the last forty years. George Voinovich has been known to oppose lowering taxes and frequently joined the Democrats on tax issues. John Warner is a moderate Republican and has centrist stances on many issues, to the point that he once faced opposition of other members of his own party when he decided to run for re-election.

Be sure to click on the gray boxes to follow the trajectories of different cohorts.

What used to be a small specialty in a few newsrooms has grown some larger wings in the past couple of years. The challenge though is that a lot of journalists aren't used to handling, let alone analyzing, a lot of data. The free and open source Data Journalism Handbook, a set of guides and case studies, hopes to help with that.

It was born at a 48 hour workshop at MozFest 2011 in London. It subsequently spilled over into an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism's leading advocates and best practitioners - including from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Helsingin Sanomat, La Nacion, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Washington Post, the Texas Tribune, Verdens Gang, Wales Online, Zeit Online and many others.

At a glance, looks like a promising resource, even if you're not a journalist.