Economic Impact on Fortune 1000
CNN money just came out with its 2009 List for the Fortune 1000, the 1000 largest American companies. This list gives us an interesting look at the health of big business throughout the United States. Companies make the Fortune based on their revenues, not their profits. General Motors comes in ranked 6th in the Fortune 1000, based on revenues ($148,979,000,000 in revenues), even though they have lost $30,860,000,000 dollars (based on profits). The Fortune List does a great job of showing this data, but we wanted to take a look at the dataset as a whole, to see if these huge companies are actually profitable. We’ve all heard the saying ‘too big to fail’, but what about asking the question ‘are they too big to profit?’

We loaded the profit data into maker!, and we immediately noticed the histogram for the layer. The vast majority of Companies all had profits that were relatively near zero, with some huge outliers. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Microsoft, and GE are still hugely profitable companies, while many of the Financial Services companies, such as AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, are unable to profit.

Histogram Shown Below (to view the histogram and filter the data on your own click the down arrow on the layers box):

I downloaded the raw data file here to start to do some calculations in Excel and play with the numbers a bit more. Here is a bit of what i learned: Only 707 of the largest companies in the US actually made any profits last year! The average profit for a Fortune 1000 company in 2009 is only $103,000,000. The average rank of companies that made money was 484, while the average rank of Companies that lost money was 536, which shows that revenues for these large companies are having almost no impact on their profits. The question then becomes what factors would predict profitability? It would be incredibly interesting to look at other variables other than just profits and revenues. Using a company’s internal data and comparing it to the other fortune 1000 companies could be very telling in which internal factors have the greatest impact on a company’s profitability, perhaps investment in technology, or lowering overhead. This type of analysis could easily be done with our GeoIQ Enterprise Solution.

Here is the Map of Fortune 1000 Profits in the US:

View full map

This map doesn’t show much variation in the size of the points due to the fact that they are so strongly clustered around the break-even point, and the outliers are so severe. 4-5 companies account for nearly half of the distribution of the histogram.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Giving birth in the USA has become increasingly controversial, especially for women hoping to have a natural and intervention-free birth. Hospitals are becoming increasingly dependent on medicalized birth and as a response, many women are turning to alternatives including delivering at free-standing birth centers and home births. Meanwhile, home births continue to be threatened by state legislation and many birth centers are closing due to high insurance rates.

April is Cesarean Awareness Month. According to the World Health Organization, “Cesarean section rates should range from about 5% to 15% in any facility, depending on its level.” With a 31.8 percent Cesarean rate in the US (nearly one third of women give birth surgically), many questions are arising regarding the necessity and safety of Cesarean sections. C-sections can be a life saving procedure in an emergency and because of the advances of medicine in the last century, many babies have been born alive and healthy who might not have survived otherwise. However a C-section, like any major surgery, can be dangerous for the mother and the baby and can add risk rather than reduce it when the procedure is done unnecessarily. Further, many other forms of medical interventions pushed in hospitals such as induction and use of pain medication can increase the need for a C-section..

I have put together some maps that may help shed light on the subject and even help women looking for alternatives to a hospital birth.

C-Section Rates
Not many states publish C-section rates at the county level and it is difficult to find rates for individual hospitals. New Jersey does have public rates by hospital. The map below shows those rates. What is alarming is that there is such a wide range of rates from hospital to hospital (18% to 62%), even when they are very close to each other geographically. For a procedure that is meant for emergencies, it is not logical that women in different hospitals would have such different chances in ending up in surgery. One major factor in this discrepancy is the individual hospital’s policy on Vaginal Birth after Cesarean (VBAC). Other hospital or individual OB protocols have an influence such as limiting the time of labor or use of drugs to augment labor.

Click here to see this map in Maker!

Birth Centers
This next map shows C-section rates by state and the locations of birth centers throughout the US. This map does show a spatial trend in C-section rates with the South and much of the Northeast and West Coast experiencing the highest rates and the group of states including New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho with the lowest rates. It is difficult to determine a certain relationship between a state’s C-section rate and the number of birth centers. Some states may have more supportive policies towards home birth such as New Mexico and therefore do not have the demand for birth centers. Other states, where the C-section rate is high, have many birth centers because women are looking for alternatives, such as in Florida. Also, more rural states may have more birth centers because of the long distances to hospitals. There are probably not enough birth centers anywhere for them to have a significant impact on the C-section rate.

Click here to see this map in Maker!

To show the number of birth centers normalized by the population of each state, the map below shows the total number of births divided by the number of birth centers. In this map, the blue states have no birth centers. The white states have the most for the population and the orange states have the least number of birth centers for the population.

Click here to see this map in Maker!

Homebirth
What used to be a normal custom, home births have become controversial to the point of being outlawed in many states, even though studies have shown that for low risk births, home births are as safe as hospital births and much less likely to end up with unnecessary medical intervention. While parents can not be persecuted for having their baby at home (although sometimes may be investigated by social services for neglect), the midwives who attend home births are in many states doing so against state laws and can face jail time. The next map shows the legal status of these mid-wives, know as Direst-Entry Midwives, for each state. The blue states are where it is legal and regulated by the state and then the others are various levels of legality with the dark orange states being the ones where home births are totally illegal. The dots on the map show the C-section rates for each state. Here you do see some relationship between the C-section rate and the legality of home birth.

Click here to see this map in Maker!

International Birth
While the US is know for having some of the most advanced medicine in the world, we rank below 45 other countries in our infant mortality rate which is 6.26. This is mostly due to a lack of access to health care however it does not speak well for the form of highly medicalized maternity care practiced in this country. Countries such as the Netherlands where home births and drug free births are more common have much lower rates of infant mortality (4.73). Also developed countries with lower C-section rates (12% in the Netherlands and 18% in France) tend to have lower infant mortality rates. This last map shows the world infant mortality rate rankings (with rank 1 having the highest rate) as well as some country’s C-section rates. C-section rates are not available for all countries and some of the rates shown on the map are from the 1990′s.

Click here to see this map in Maker!

What is most important is that the choice of birth place and method is left up to the women, which is less and less the case in the US. Policies against home births and VBACS and medical staff that push induction, C-sections, use of forceps and other interventions take away the ability of a mother to have a natural and normal birth. While all of these procedures are necessary in certain circumstances, they are abused and too often the mother is not informed of risks and other options. Further, alternatives are being taken away from mothers by state legislation. Check out these maps to find out the legality of home birth and the C-section rate in your state, to find the birth center nearest you, or to just learn more on the subject.

Popularity: 13% [?]

We’ve been swamped with work on our enterprise product, but finally found a bit of time to push some new updates to the GeoCommons public site. So, we’ve added the following new hotness to Finder! and Maker! for your mapping enjoyment:

1. New color ramps – (the cartographers designed the top row to compliment Google Terrain and the bottom row for Virtual Earth Road. They also look good with the other base maps!)

2. Simplified Uploader – (just pick one file and we’ll figure out the rest)

3. Embed functionality – (share your maps across the web as a sydicatable widget, just click the “details” button on any map)

4. Prj support – (break the bonds of the WGS 84 and load any projection into GeoCommons to share and map)

5. Geoparsed txt files – (with the help of MetaCarta upload your text documents and have the locations plotted on the map along with hyperlinked text navigation)

6. New Maker! load bar and layer identifyer – (some of the data layers in GeoCommons can be pretty big so we added a load bar that identifies the name of each data layer you load)

We are aiming to make for more regualr updates, and the coolest features are yet to come so stay tuned. To provide some incentive to check out the new features and raise awareness for Earth Day we are running a contest – ‘GeoCommons Goes Green’.

Just upload a compelling dataset and/or make a map pertaining to sustainability, climate change, civic initiatives or any other theme that promotes awareness and education of environmental issues. Tag your dataset and map with the contest tag “GCgreen” and FortiusOne’s panel o’ judges will choose the best dataset/map on May 11th . Winners will receive the following fabulous prizes:

First Prize: Planet Earth 5 DVD Set

Third Prize: Stickers printed with your Maps!

Join in and help mobilize the GeoCommons Community in our efforts to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment.

We are always looking for feedback, so let us know what you think of the new features, and if we missed soemthing you are dying to see on GeoCommons definitely let us know.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I regularly visit the British operated web news source, Guardian, to check if they have published any new links to data which could be generated through Finder! to create interesting maps in Maker!. Two of my recent blogs, Global Contaceptive Use and Champagne Anyone?, were both mapped using data linked from Guardian’s Data Blog and Data Store.

One of the main functions of GeoCommons is being able to take numerical data and visualize it geographically, thus making a powerful and aesthetically appealing analysis rather than looking at a plain spreadsheet.  Below is a map created from a Guardian Data Store link to World Health Organization data which illustrates the prevalence of global tobacco users over the age of 15:

(Click the map to view in Maker!)

Click here to view the dataset in Finder! and you can also map different age classes such as prevalence of current tobacco use among adolescents (13-15 years) (%) both sexes, prevalence of current tobacco use among adolescents (13-15 years) (%) female, prevalence of current tobacco use among adolescents (13-15 years) (%) male, prevalence of current tobacco use among adults (over 15 years) (%) female, and prevalence of current tobacco use among adults (over 15 years) (%) male.

Popularity: 4% [?]