Thinking About Unemployment (Part 1)

Having a job is a pretty major concern for most people; and the unemployment rate at a national level can have significant impacts beyond the individual.  There is varying public perception out there as to the scope and magnitude of unemployment in the US from the last recession, but what really are those numbers? and what do they mean? I wanted to dig deeper into some unemployment stats and see what I could uncover.  

The first thing I did was pull some data from the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis and hustled a quick heatmap to get an idea of what the data looks like.  By doing so we can see that there are annual trends for unemployment, and it becomes more apparent where the periods of recessions are grouped.  

The next step was to put this in context and try to uncover trends. This involved fitting the data to a time series and attaching a LOESS curve along with periods of recession extrapolated from the heatmap.  This does a good job of showing the spikes of unemployment relative to recessions, and the overall increasing rate of unemployment since 1948. It also reveals to us that in terms of unemployment  the recession of the early 1980's was worse than the most recent recession. 

The last step was to break this information down to the county level and track the spatial movement and shape of unemployment.  The time frame to do this was condensed a bit to 2008-2011, but the effects are interesting to say the least. The data shows that unemployment woes began in the urban areas, then spread into the interior.  Conversely, it also appears that the recovery began in urban area as well, and has been diffusing inland from there.  

For my next section I'm going to break this information down a bit more and provide a deeper analysis.  

Where Do People Live?

It's Thursday, and I've come across some data, that means it's themetic map Thursdays!  I decided to hustle a quick and dirty themetic map detailing major populated areas of the United States as of 2012.  It's always interesting to see the pockets of urban development as you begin to head further west from the population centers on the east coast.  That is until you bang up against California.  Nothing earth shattering here, but sometimes it's good to go back to your foundation and remember where everthing is (or isn't) Enjoy.

The World Sees The Internet Through Chrome Glasses

I wanted to create a visualization that showed world internet usage, but in a way that was insightful and meaningful.  I gathered data from several online sources and using ArcGIS, Inkscape, and Excel I came up with the following:

Looking over the results it's apparent how strong internet usage is in North America and Europe.  Peering a bit closer it was interesting to see high usage in New Zealand and Australia.  I wonder if this factored in Google's project loon site selection?  Breaking down usage by world region shows that even though a smaller percentage of China's population is using the internet, that segment alone is enough to position China and the other Asian nations(I'm looking at you South Korea) as the world's leaders in accessing the internet.  

One thing that jumped out at me was the high adoption in the United Arab Emirates.  A quick QA of the data showed that there weren't any transposition or transformation errors.  After digging in a bit more to some stats about the United Arab Emirates  it become more apparent why their adoption was so high;  their population is younger with a median age of 30, which is educated, and has a good standard of living.  Mobile penetration is also very high as well. 


I can only assume that this combination would easily facilitate access to the wired world.

Lastly, Chrome is the world's leading web browser, which I'm sure makes google very happy.

Now that's interesting...