A little while back Chad Skelton, a reporter at the Vancouver Sun, emailed us that he would like to use our maps for some of the news stories he was working on. We’d been working on creating an embeddable widget for our maps and thought this would be great chance to test one out. Specifically Chad had FOIA’d parking ticket data from the city of Vancouver and wanted to show where the ticket hot spots were.

We set up Chad with a test account on a virtual server, running GeoCommons, and let him go to town. What he created (without writing any code) was really quite impressive. You can see the embed below:

The story ran on the front page of the website and it was great to see GeoCommons maps being distributed across the Web. Chad was also kind enough to contribute the FOIA’d parking data to the public GeoCommons site and you can download it here:

Parking Tickets for ‘Time Limit Exceeded’ , Vancouver, 2004-2008

Parking Tickets for ‘No Stopping’, Vancouver, 2004-2008

Expired Meter Tickets Issued, Vancouver, 2004-2008

Tickets issued for ‘Permit Parking’ , Vancouver, 2004-2008

The cool synergy in this is the potential of media working with government to make data more transparent through accessible and open technologies.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Which countries around the world is there a high prevalence of contraceptive use?  And which gender uses condoms more in the global community? Males or females? The World Health Organization (WHO) latest figures shows that China is leading the world in contraceptive prevalence.  Rather surprisingly in second place is the UK with rising birth rates in teen pregnancy.

Below I have created a map in Maker! that shows this data uploaded into Finder! from the World Heath Organization:

Click the map to view in Maker.

The WHO’s Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) is probably one of the most extensive and reliable health indicator databases out there.  There is data available on just about every health indicator and can be easily uploaded into Finder to make interesting visual analyitics like the  map above.

Click to view dataset in Finder!:

http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/10770

Popularity: 5% [?]

While I hardly think that the immature and offensive behavior of the hate group that call themselves Westboro Baptist Church deserve public attention, the fact of the matter is that those who are targeted by them (grieving families for example) may have a hard time ignoring their harassment. That’s right, this group has managed to offend almost everyone in the country and around the world with the picketing they do at funerals, schools, ect. “The church’s web site… is deservedly listed as a hate site by many internet watchdog organizations. Its content is the verbal equivalent to what you would find in any other sewer.”
Now, reading some of their literature, it is hard to even take them seriously. Many of their statements seem like a bad Saturday Night Live skit. But on the other side, their messages of hate seem to have a uniting effect for everyone else.

Personally, I was inspired to write this blog by the reaction from my former High School for a planned protest from the WBC apparently because the school has a Diversity Club and a Gay Straight Alliance. Many from the school are planning on attending a counter-protest to defend their school, their diversity and hopefully just to poke a little fun and this hate group.

How to deal with groups like these in a culture of free speech is difficult. Some think that ignoring them and refusing to participate in a dialogue with them is the best approach. Many find that by simply making fun of their absurdity to the point that no one even takes them seriously will do the trick. Others believe that standing up against them through counter protest and speaking out against the hate that they preach is best.

Well, Im not sure what the answer is but for those who would like to attend the nearest picketing event to you, either to laugh at them or to speak out against them, or if you just want to avoid them, here is a map containing their upcoming protests. Just to demonstrate how Maker! can be a great community organizing tool!

Visit Maker! to view this map in more detaile.

Please note, all offensive language used for the events have been left in the dataset solely for the purpose of providing accurate information of their intentions.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Every year CNNMoney.com releases a list of the top companies in the United States called the Fortune 1000. This uber-competitive list can be an interesting gauge of the status of the economy and can also reveal which companies are up-and-coming and which companies are struggling to hold on.

Below is a map I created of the headquarters of the Fortune 1000 companies for 2008. Click on the map to see specific companies and get information about their revenue, profits, and location.

I used proportional symbols to represent largest to smallest revenues. From this map we can see that states such as California, Texas, New Jersey and New York are revenue rich due to the large numbers of Fortune companies there. Click some of the symbols to get a specific dollar value for any of the companies. This dataset can be viewed in Finder!

There are a lot of interesting data to analyze and the site also provides some pretty cool breakdowns of the list, such as the top 50 companies that climbed up the list and the top 50 companies that stumbled down the list. This data is from 2006 so may not include some of the 2008 list, but illustrates the constant rise and fall of companies all vying for the highest rank. Below is a map I created from those two lists highlighting this competitive ranking system. Click on the points to see which companies went up or down in the ranks. The orange symbols represent those companies that climbed the ranks, whereas the blue show those that fell. The largest blue symbols show the least drop in rank and the smallest blue symbols show the greatest drop. I used a dataset for climbers and a dataset for fallers, which can be viewed in Finder!.

Some of the companies remain in the highest ranks consistently, so I created a map in Maker! from my original data set, by combining ranking data from 2007 and 2008. I focused on the companies that stayed in the top 100 for both years. The points include data for ranks for both years, revenues, and profits. Typically, companies with the largest overall revenues have stayed the same rank with Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, GM, ConocoPhillips, General Electric, For Motor, Citigroup, and Bank of America completing the top nine for the past two years. Below is a map of these companies which can be found at Geocommons.

This dataset can be viewed in Finder!

If you are looking for a job or want to relocate this list can be a valuable resource for locating hotbeds of Fortune Companies in the United States. Upon first glance, it is obvious that California’s coast and the East Coast have tons of Fortune Companies, but if you look closer, you can find many in the midwest. Minneapolis and Chicago are two examples of Fortune dense cities. See if you can come up with an interesting map of your own.

Popularity: 19% [?]