Earnings and Unemployment by College Major
The Wall Street Journal recently published a table of income and unemployment data that presented pay and employment rates for various college majors. The original study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce contained enough additional details that I thought it might be worth trying to incorporate the information …
Have the Mainstream Media Jumped the Shark?
There was a recent article in Slate that asked why the mainstream media was having such a tough time figuring out the message of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a full-throated supporter of #OWS, but I do think that it’s pretty easy to understand why they’re …
Politicians Discover Data Science
During the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign, the online design community devoted a lot of pixels to comparisons of the two candidate’s web sites (a few great examples here, here, and here). The overall consensus was that Obama won the war for eyeballs by emphasizing design, web usability, multimedia, and robust social networking. According to an …
Unemployment vs. Underemployment
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the results of two major surveys on the first Friday of every month (the Current Employment Statistics or CES and the Current Population Statistics or CPS). Although the amount of information in these two surveys is quite extensive, the general public is probably familiar with only …
King Bhumibol is a Noob
In an effort to suppress disparaging remarks about the monarchy, the government of Thailand has recently established an official agency called the Office of Prevention and Suppression of Information Technology Crimes. The sole purpose of this department is to enforce the country’s lèse-majesté laws by combing the Internet for anything offensive to King Bhumibol Adulyadej and …
Three Rules of PowerPoint
The sheer ubiquity of the Microsoft Office suite has created a cottage industry around the evaluation and critique of its bundled applications. Microsoft Excel, with its attendant realm of spreadmarts and shadow databases, seems to draw the most negative attention from the business world (particularly IT) but PowerPoint isn’t far …
Six Degrees of Joy Division
My local record store used to have this great poster on the back wall that explained how several dozen British indie bands from the 80s were all linked together through their various group members. The title of the poster was something like “Why All These Bands Sound the Same” and it was clearly a tongue-and-cheek …
CNN published the mugshots of all of the biker gang members who were arrested after the recent shootout in a Waco, TX restaurant. There were a total of 171 pictures, all in the same standard pose and most in the same standard orange jumpsuit: Seeing all of these pictures got …
There’s nothing too complicated about this post. I’ve been interested in creating an illustration of the U.S. Interstate system for awhile but my initial concept of a “subway-style” diagram of the network had already been done. After some recent experimentation with the D3 Javascript library, I decided that it might …
My family visited Washington D.C. last year for Spring Break and, during our 12-hour drive, I remember noticing a subtle change in the names of the cities and towns we were passing through. In the beginning, the place names had a familiar mid-western flavor; one that mixed Native American origins …
I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an …