A little late to the US Election Party

You may have heard about the United States having an election recently.  In fact, all the talk about Florida and racial divisions might have reminded you of other recent elections.

I spent some happy time after the 2004 election gathering data, by county, in a Fathom document.  I was inspired by some fascinating articles with incredible data visualizations:

The changing colors of America (1960-2004)

Maps of the 2016 US presidential election results (it used to be 2004)

and posed a few questions on The Math Forum.

Fathom is licensed by the Ontario Ministry of Education for use in its publicly funded schools and Ontario has an innovative Data Management course at the Grade 12 level.

Here are two of the plots that I created in Fathom which I also think are very cool - not quite as fancy as the ones above however.  These make you wonder where "middle America" has gone...



The comments related to the collection are worth a read.

The Google Maps API

I have been learning a lot about javascript and the Google Maps API lately. If you are interested, you might find my delicious tags helpful. It includes links to sets of map markers that have been painstakingly created and then shared.

I have created a geocoding tool that shows off some of my learning. It will allow you to enter an address and get its lat/long coordinates. It also displays the lat/long coordinates of the centre of the map in case the address isn't enough. If you view the source, I have commented the more interesting bits.

The tool is a dumbed-down version of one that I am working on with all the Thunder Bay Community Services Agencies.
It takes 20 or 30 seconds to map the hundreds of addresses out of their database, assign different markers, set up the interactions, and display the results on three maps.


It has been interesting to apply my growing knowledge of actionscript (which is a derivative of javascript) to the object model of a browser page.