How many people in the world do you think will die in the next day?
See here for a psuedo-hint, which is the somewhat easier related question which inspired this.
See here for the answer, from the U. S. Census Bureau.
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
10 March 2008
18 October 2007
Un-Austria, and some thoughts on population density
Strange Maps brings us a map of Un-Austria, originally due to Babak Fakhamzadeh. The purpose of this map is to illustrate certain statistics about the Austrian people by associating those groups of people with parts of a map; seven percent of Austrians are "not proud of their nationality" and so an area roughly one-fourteenth of the size of Austria is marked as such.
It's an interesting concept, but I see problems with it. First, it gives the impression that people who are in one of the marked groups aren't in any of the others; this isn't true. (In the most extreme case, shouldn't "members of voluntary environmental organizations" be contained entirely within "members of voluntary organizations"?) Second, although I have no concept of the geography of Austria, I'm sure there are parts of it that are more populated than other parts, and I wonder if the map creates false impressions for those people who actually do live in Austria. (For an American example, New Jersey makes up one part in 434 of the land of the United States. Yet one in thirty-four Americans live in New Jersey. I am aware of this, so if someone associated the land making up New Jersey with some one-in-434 subset of Americans, I might get confused. On the other extreme, Carbon County, Wyoming has about the same area, but only about one in twenty thousand Americans lives there. My point is that most people living in a given country probably have some rough idea of how population density in the country is spread out; I suspect that the way they would "intuitively" interpret a map such as this one takes this into account, but not perfectly. (If I had to guess, the population we intuitively perceive to be in a region of a map such as this one is proportional to the integral of the square root of population density, although I just made that up; it somehow seems appealing that we would perceive an area that's actually four times as dense as another to be two times as dense, because that seems to point to some sort of idea of "linear density". Please ignore the fact that the units here don't work.)
It's an interesting concept, but I see problems with it. First, it gives the impression that people who are in one of the marked groups aren't in any of the others; this isn't true. (In the most extreme case, shouldn't "members of voluntary environmental organizations" be contained entirely within "members of voluntary organizations"?) Second, although I have no concept of the geography of Austria, I'm sure there are parts of it that are more populated than other parts, and I wonder if the map creates false impressions for those people who actually do live in Austria. (For an American example, New Jersey makes up one part in 434 of the land of the United States. Yet one in thirty-four Americans live in New Jersey. I am aware of this, so if someone associated the land making up New Jersey with some one-in-434 subset of Americans, I might get confused. On the other extreme, Carbon County, Wyoming has about the same area, but only about one in twenty thousand Americans lives there. My point is that most people living in a given country probably have some rough idea of how population density in the country is spread out; I suspect that the way they would "intuitively" interpret a map such as this one takes this into account, but not perfectly. (If I had to guess, the population we intuitively perceive to be in a region of a map such as this one is proportional to the integral of the square root of population density, although I just made that up; it somehow seems appealing that we would perceive an area that's actually four times as dense as another to be two times as dense, because that seems to point to some sort of idea of "linear density". Please ignore the fact that the units here don't work.)
11 July 2007
Go west, young man?
From Strange Maps: Single Guys Live in LA, Single Girls in NYC. This is a map from National Geographic showing metropolitan areas in the US by whether they have more single men or single women. The LA area has the largest plurality of single men -- the number of single men minus the number of single women -- and the New York area has the largest plurality of single women.
I think it might make more sense to show this in terms of percentages, not absolute numbers of people. (If I had their data and the time, I'd do it. I think the data is available from the Census Bureau.)
There is a similar map showing the sex ratio in each county of the US, which shows some of the same trends. The Northeast doesn't look like as much of an outlier on that map, though, probably because the Northeast has some very large urban areas. New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston are #1, 4, 6, 7 respectively. But this isn't exactly what I'm looking for, because it counts children and married people. (Married couples almost always bring the sex ratio back towards 1:1, since except in Massachusetts they consist of one male and one female.)
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that states with more males have faster-growing economies, because places where the economy is growing faster probably have more risky ventures going on and risk tends to attract males more than females. The two cities out of the largest ten that have the largest proportion of females are Philadelphia and Detroit, which seems to support my idea.
Strange Maps also features a lot of other strange maps: the U.S. divided into a dozen or so smaller nations and the Antipodes Map, which visually illustrates that for most points on land, the point on the other side of the earth is in the sea. If you drill straight through the center of the Earth, you won't come out in China. Unless you're from Chile or Argentina, that is -- which are both countries from which I've had exactly one page view.
I think it might make more sense to show this in terms of percentages, not absolute numbers of people. (If I had their data and the time, I'd do it. I think the data is available from the Census Bureau.)
There is a similar map showing the sex ratio in each county of the US, which shows some of the same trends. The Northeast doesn't look like as much of an outlier on that map, though, probably because the Northeast has some very large urban areas. New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston are #1, 4, 6, 7 respectively. But this isn't exactly what I'm looking for, because it counts children and married people. (Married couples almost always bring the sex ratio back towards 1:1, since except in Massachusetts they consist of one male and one female.)
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that states with more males have faster-growing economies, because places where the economy is growing faster probably have more risky ventures going on and risk tends to attract males more than females. The two cities out of the largest ten that have the largest proportion of females are Philadelphia and Detroit, which seems to support my idea.
Strange Maps also features a lot of other strange maps: the U.S. divided into a dozen or so smaller nations and the Antipodes Map, which visually illustrates that for most points on land, the point on the other side of the earth is in the sea. If you drill straight through the center of the Earth, you won't come out in China. Unless you're from Chile or Argentina, that is -- which are both countries from which I've had exactly one page view.
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