John Travolta fans may be excited to see him singing and dancing again in the remake of Hairspray, due for release next month, but not everyone is happy with his involvement in the film. Travolta is a Scientologist and because of that some in the gay community are calling for a boycott of the film. They claim that Scientology is homophobic and thus Travolta should not be playing the part of Edna Turnblad, an iconic gay role.

Kevin Naff, editor of the Washington Blade, is an outspoken critic of the situation. "It's well known that Scientology has operated reparative therapy clinics to try and 'cure' gays," said Naff. "Scientologists are required to donate a hefty portion of their income to the church. . . So, by going to this movie, gay people are literally putting money into an organization that seeks to 'cure' them." In response, John Carmichael of the New York Church of Scientology stated that "Scientology doesn't try to tell people what their sexual orientation should be. The emphasis is on helping people survive better in the world. If a person comes into Scientology and they are involved in doing anything that they consider detrimental to their survival, then they can change that compulsion."

As I followed this controversy, I questioned what else I knew about Scientology, and all I could think of was Tom Cruise. So I wondered if the church had followings in regions other than Hollywood. Using the church locator on the Scientology website, I mapped the 109 addresses that they listed. It was surprising to see the Midwest with 15 churches, and some other hot spots in Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. However, as expected California still dominates the map.

Some other interesting statistics from the official website of Scientology:

It is the fastest growing religion on the planet. 26% of its members are former Catholics, 27% are former Protestants. 76% of its members are under 40. 30% of its members have been with the church for less than 1.5 years.

Back to the acting world, Scientology hasn’t seemed to do any favors for actors' careers. It will be interesting to see if the religion continues to grow among the celebrity community.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The once red hot housing market has been cooling down over the last year and half. The Housing sector indicators such as new housing starts, unsold homes inventory, median prices of new and existing homes, all present a mixed picture. And over the last several months, the running subtext has been that of rising number of deliquencies, foreclosures and the associated rise in bankrupticies declared by subprime lenders. Since late last year more than 90 subprime lenders have gone bankrupt and millions of borrowers have lost their homes. So how did this happen? To get a little insight one has to go a few years back in time to early 1990s when the subprime sector began.

The subprime lending sector was one of the most innovative in terms of offering mortgage products and in evaluating risk to lenders as well as creditworthiness of buyers. It quickly gained popularity among those who could not afford a large down payment and/or whose not-so-stellar credit ratings would disqualify them from ever getting mortgage loans. Those who could not dream of owning a home, were buying houses with the help of subprime loans. Many of these loan products with exotic names such as Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM of 3 or 5 or 7 years), Balloon Mortgage, Capped and Collar mortgage, Discount Rate mortgage, Cash back mortgage etc., had one thing in common. These loans essentially amounted to luring those with low income and risky credit to own a property they could barely afford.

The historically low interest rates and all these subprime lending schemes led to higher demand for housing, which in turn drove the prices of new and existing homes through the roof. Those with homes suddenly found that their homes were worth a lot more, giving them an inflated home equity, which in turn allowed them to refinance their properties with risky adjustable interest rates. Since everybody was involved in this, taking (undue) risk seemed to be the mantra of the day. It appears that one of the former Reserve Board members did suggest crackdown on subprime lenders, the unofficial suggestion was all but ignored. Any way, that suugestion is some what peripheral to the problem with the subprime lending, because none of this would work if there were no willing customers who bought into the idea of ever increasing home values that would help them tide over any future problems and lenders who seemed to tap into unlimited funds pouring in from the investors who were awash with money, mainly due to very low interest rates and comforted by their dealings in the securitized mortage financing. Many home owners treated their homes as their personal ATMs by refinancing their homes multiple times, adding to their already high volume mortgage debts. Its estimated that, from 1991 to 2005, extraction from refinancing of home equity pumped in an additional $1.5 trillion into the U.S economy in the form of personal consumer spending. This certainly helped the economy but at the personal level it pushed many under the rising mountain of debt.

What happens when "borrowing beyond your means" can't last forever. With rising interest rates and initial low payment periods ending for ARMs and other exotic home mortgages, many home owners are now facing the reality of their monthly mortgage payments go through the roof. And when they cant afford to pay the monthly mortages, the Subprime lenders see their revenues vanish. This in turn causes worried investors to stop funneling funds to subprime lenders. For the subprime lenders with huge number of bad loans, no revenues and no investors backing, the only option left is to declare bankruptcy. As the home credit markets have tightened and lending practices have became more strict, there are fewer home buyers, which in turn has increased the inventories of unsold homes. All of these factors have contributed to the current downturn in housing sector. Its too early to say whether there are more bad loans out there that could affect the markets to greater degree and whether it could take toll on the U.S. economy. We may be witnessing the beginnings of an apparent meltdown in subprime sector.

We at FortiusOne decided to explore the spatial extent of the subprime markets. Below is a heat map that shows at census tract level borrowers of the now bankrupt subprime lender (New Century Financial ). The data is based on loan reports submitted by lender to Federal Reserve under the HMDA (Home Mortage Disclosure Act).

The map shows rate spread by census tract. Technically the rate spread is the difference between the mortgage interest rate charged to a borrower and the yield on annual treasury security. In layman's terms, subprime lender will set higher spread rates for higher risk loans. The data in this map shows average APRs range from a low of 8.75 (3.5 rate spread in Zipcode 49095, MI) for the so called less risky loans to as high as 14.75 (rate spread of 9.5 in San Antonio, TX) for high risk loans. Further analysis of the data at census tract level reveals that high APR loans were located in the ensus tracts that had high percentage of minorities and high values for the loan to income ratios. If you wish to further explore subprime space, please visit the Geocommons website and do a search using key words Subprime or Foreclosures

Explore a slice of the subprime lending market by panning and zooming in to different geographic locations in the U.S.

Who do you think is responsible for the current higher rates of deliquencies and foreclosures: The Feds for not cracking down on excesses commited by subprime lenders, the greedy/risky borrowers or the unscrupulous subprime lenders. If you wish you could voice your opinion below.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Issue: Should the Federal Hate Crime Law be expanded to include crimes committed based on the victim's gender or sexual orientation?

I thought an interesting topic for the blog today would be the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. The bill, which was passed in the House back in May, is soon to go up in from of the Senate. Probably in the next couple of days. The law would extend the Federal Hate Crime Law to include crimes committed based on the sexual orientation of the victim. Currently, the law covers crimes tied to someone’s race, color, national origin, or religion.

The issue has been stirring up quite a controversy. On the one hand, some argue that such legislation goes against freedom of speech and religion. Quoting a recent editorial in the Fredericksburg Freelance Star, titled “Hate This”, someone writes that “Adding gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity to the protected groups risks stifling discussion and hamstringing religious freedom. In other countries with strong "hate crimes" laws--notably Sweden and Canada--pastors have stood trial for preaching that homosexual behavior is a sin.”

The other side of the coin is that crimes against gays and lesbians are the third most common type of hate crime, following race and religion, and crimes that fall into this category deserve justic equal to other types of hate crimes. In response to the “Hate This” editorial, someone eloquently makes this case. They write, “The current hate-crime law applies only to violent crimes committed because of the victim's race, color, national origin, or religion. To deliberately exclude the third-most-reported category from the existing hate-crime bill sends its own hateful message.”

In 2004, there were 1,197 incidents of crime where the bias motivation was based on the victim's sexual orientation, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. While the problem pervades in every corner of the United States, in both rural and urban environments and across multiple counties and cities, and interesting aspect to this is that the concentration of incidents in the city appear to be limited to a few parts of the country. The heat map below reveals these hotspots.

How are the candidates weighing in on the issue?

The Human Rights Campaign publishes a scorecard that rates members of congress on issues tied to sexual orientation and on how they have voted in congress on related bills. It looks like a great resource to find out how many of our 2008 Presidential candidates feel about the issue at the center of today's blog.

How do you weigh in on the issue?

Want to find out more about hate crime in the United States?

If you go to geocommons and type the words "hate" and "crime" you can explore how prevalent other types of hate crimes are and look also at hate crimes that have occurred at universities.

Popularity: 5% [?]

In my last post I started making a case for maintaining a simple way of publishing simple feature data in KML and talked up the KML Schema tag quite a bit.

The key requirements I had for any such endeavor going forward were:

• Simplicity
• Everything you need to get the basic feature data out should be in one file
• Simplicity
• We shouldn’t discount the benefits of being able to embed styling logic into a geographic data interchange format
• Simplicity

In this post, I intend to put forth a suggestion that I think represents a good combination of the points outlined above, and still allows for KML publishers and consumers to go about their business as usual, should they not have any need for more complex feature data into their documents. Additionally, I think the sort of approach I’m about to suggest could have wide ranging applications across multiple other formats as well, which is an added side benefit.

Read past the jump for the full writeup, but my proposal centers largely around the use of microformats.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

OK – the title is a bit over the top sensationalistic, but the metadata debate opens up the larger topic of technology being used to increase participation. There is a long history of technology increasing participation – the PC Revolution with the microcomputer, word processor, spreadsheet, etc – Web 1.0 with online auctions, web home pages, online communities, etc. – Web 2.0 with blogs, social networks, citizen journalism etc. If you really wanted to push the argument you could go back to the assembly line, the steam engine, or really stretch it back to crop rotation. I’d argue that the real power of Web 2.0 has been the democratization of participation through technology. Blogs are allowing anyone to have a voice - participatory media sites like Digg, Newsvine, StumbledUpon, Furl are allowing the public to vote what is news – self broadcasting platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv will put anyone on TV – participatory office applications like Writely and Google Spreadsheets are all changing the face of how the public interacts with technology and each other.

Mapping has very much been a part of this story, with Google Earth/Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps and new projects like Open Street Maps all playing a role. In fact it was mapping applications that kicked off the mashup phenomenon with the combination of Google Maps and Craig’s List rental listings. Not surprisingly participatory mapping mashups sprung up in short order with innovative sites like Platial, Tagzania, Frappr and others. In these applications anyone could create a location on a map and tag it with social information like photos or descriptions about why they created it. These efforts were very much in the Web 2.0 model of mass participation where anyone could contribute information. For the most part, though, the data was fun and not what the GIS world would consider substantive. Sometimes this movement is called neogeography, web mapping, or a leading part of the larger geoweb.

In the GIS world it is a much different model where a small number of highly trained professionals have access to data and tools with which they render maps to be distributed to everyone else. As technology has advanced these maps started to be delivered to web browsers and have some interactivity. The model always remained the same though – professional gate keepers that brokered knowledge out to the masses. As Google and other mapping applications API’s have proliferated, the worlds of neogeography and traditional GIS have begun to intersect. Now the major GIS vendors are offering API’s to their technologies and there are new more dynamic ways for maps and information to be delivered. While the new technologies coming from the GIS vendors all have the right buzz words they still work on the very same model. A small group of trained professionals acting as gate keepers to the masses – whether their maps are delivered to you as piece of paper or a rich media Ajax application.

This is the crux, I believe, of the metadata debate. Let’s be honest adding a metadata link to a system like ours or anyone else’s is not really the issue. Adding in the link is not so tough and we’ll figure out an effective way to link to metadata if it is there. The issue is opening up geographic data and analysis tools to the masses. Metadata is a convenient barrier to entry as is the expense of software, training, and infrastructure to even get your foot in the proverbial geospatial door. The big goal of GeoCommons is to break down those barriers, so that geographic data and analysis can become accessible and participatory to everyone. I think that technology inexorably moves in this direction, but in my mind that is not why it is crucial to open up geographic data and analysis. The vast majority of geographic data is a public good. It is paid for and created by governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The mission of the data creators is to have the data readily available and consumable by the public, because they are inherently the ones that have paid for it. Yet we have a huge middleman that has grown up between the public and the data. A middle man that requires you to buy software, take training classes to use it, and support their ecosystem in order to access and consume the data. This ecosystem has in turned created a profession of people who have taken the courses, put in the time, and understands the often complicated world of geographic data and analysis. Neither the ecosystem nor the profession wants to see that cozy arrangement disrupted. Yet that is exactly what we are on the brink of.

Don’t get me wrong I am not advocating the end of Geographic Information Science or Systems. There is sophistication in the discipline that will never be comprehensible to the masses and that will always be the case. I spent way too long in grad school trying to sort it all out to have delusions that my Mom is going to be computing Voronoi tessellations. There are great things that the GIS world has and will continue to contribute, but it should not be an all or nothing monopoly. I do believe that access to geographic data and simple analysis tools should be made available to everyone, and I should not have to jump through the ridiculous barriers of entry to consume the data my tax dollars have already paid for. That all said there is an incredible amount of work that needs to be done to make this happen. We may or may not figure it all out, but we’ll push the ball forward and I’d put all the money in my piggy bank on the model changing through one innovation or another.

Popularity: 9% [?]