Earlier this week, I looked at the role of airports in the economic development of cities and regions. Today, I turn to a fairly obvious question whose answer is less obvious: is city and metro size a function of airport size? The short answer is “yes,” but the relationship is not one to one—and the mathematics of that relationship has wider implications. In general, the bigger the city the more airport activities there are, however they are measured. Metro size is strongly correlated with the total number of flights (.56) and the number of passengers (.59), but less so with total cargo (.24). This makes sense, as cargo hubs are often sited in locations that are equidistant from a number of different markets, rather than ... Continue reading →
Earlier this week, I looked at the role of airports in the economic development of cities and regions. Today, I turn to a fairly obvious question whose answer is less obvious: is city and metro size a function of airport size? The short answer is “yes,” but the relationship is not one to one—and the mathematics of that relationship has wider implications. In general, the bigger the city the more airport activities there are, however they are measured. Metro size is strongly correlated with the total number of flights (.56) and the number of passengers (.59), but less so with total cargo (.24). This makes sense, as cargo hubs are often sited in locations that are equidistant from a number of different markets, rather than ... Continue reading →
Earlier this week, I looked at the role of airports in the economic development of cities and regions. Today, I turn to a fairly obvious question whose answer is less obvious: is city and metro size a function of airport size? The short answer is “yes,” but the relationship is not one to one—and the mathematics of that relationship has wider implications. In general, the bigger the city the more airport activities there are, however they are measured. Metro size is strongly correlated with the total number of flights (.56) and the number of passengers (.59), but less so with total cargo (.24). This makes sense, as cargo hubs are often sited in locations that are equidistant from a number of different markets, rather than ... Continue reading →
Visualizing where the levels of crooks in government are highest Good / Column Five Corruption is hot these days. A verdict in the John Edwards case is expected imminently. A top aide to D.C Mayor Vince Gray faces jail time for obstructing justice, while a former Washington City Council member was just sentenced to three years in prison for stealing from youth programs. Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel has returned $150,000 in donations after reports that they may have come from questionable practices. And in a boon to crooks across the Land of Lincoln, Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney in Illinois and scourge of the corrupt, announced on Wednesday he's stepping down. Of course, it's not as if corruption ever went out of style. This infographic ... Continue reading →
Here's a bucket map of tweets by proportion of bored tweeters, or excited. As you can see there are pretty distinct geographic trends around this relative state of mind. Why: Social networking data can provide lots of information, and fast. Plotting the prevalence of a keyword from among the population of tweets is an interesting way to normalize for the old problem of first order trends in a dataset. The raw tweet point locations of bored and excited would just look like a sampled distribution of tweets in general, by mapping proportion within equally populous zones you get a sense of actual variability. It's also interesting to choose a set of related keywords so you get a comparative graphic of related (in this case, opposite) ... Continue reading →
By Globe Staff Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s video game company, 38 Studios, has laid off all of its employees in the wake of financial difficulties, according to a company insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Providence company, which had close to 400 employees, attracted top talent from the videogame industry. 38 Studios received a $75 million loan guarantee from Rhode Island in 2010 to move from Maynard to Providence. But Rhode Island officials held emergency meetings after the company was two weeks late on a $1.1 million payment it owed the state this month and asked the state for millions more in aid to stay afloat. The firm applied to Rhode Island for $8.4 million in film-tax credits, which it ... Continue reading →
