Olympic Medals Map

The NY Times has an interactive map of Olympic medals won by country:



This represents medals won in the Vancouver Olympics thus far. You'll notice that the United States has a larger circle than Canada. This is because the United States has won more medals than Canada. I draw attention to this fact because the Canadians were all bragging about how they were going to win the most medals. Clearly they are going to fail to do so. Their hubris rankles; hubris belongs to Americans and Russians. In Canadians it is just... unbecoming. Also, as a United Statesian, it's fun to root for my country on the rare occasions when we are the underdog, like in the winter Olympics and the World Cup.

The map has medal winners going back to the first Winter Olympics in 1924. You can see that it was basically a meeting of Europeans, with a few odd North Americans thrown in, until the last few cycles. Now the North Americans are a much bigger presence, as are the Asians and even the bleepin' Australians, who need to knock it off with the excelling at sports all the time. Are there even any ski resorts in Australia?

Meanwhile, The Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010 team sends along their effort to google map some stuff of interest around Vancouver. They describe it as "a mixture of google bombing, counter-cartography and psychogeography that uses Google Maps to contest the online/offline representations of Vancouver during the Olympics." I link to them here mainly because I enjoy the words "counter-cartography" and "psychogeography."

The New and Improved Geography of Personality - Now Includes Canada!

A little while ago, I looked at a study on the geography of personality by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling and Jeff Potter. That work looked at the geographic distribution among the 50 states of the prevalence of the "big five" personality traits: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousnness, and openness. Well, Richard Florida has maps that present similar data; except that these ignore state boundaries, which gives a clearer and more fine-grained sense of the actual distribution of those traits; and better yet, these maps include Canada. So here are the maps of the geography of personality for the US and Canada. (Note: Florida cites, as the source for these maps, Jason Rentfrow and Kevin Stolarick, and the data represented in these maps seem to show some slightly different patterns than the other paper, which I'll refer to as the Rentfrow et al. paper, even though both of these, technically, are Rentfrow et al. papers (do you think Peter and Jason are related?).)



According to Rentfrow, et al., extroversion is generally associated with "sociability, energy, and health," and extroverted people tend to socialize more, but also tend to be more indiscriminate in their associations; they don't necessarily have more close friends. The big hubs for extroversion seem to be centered around Chicago, Atlanta, and Florida, with Bos-Ny-Wash and California being the least extroverted regions. Canada is more uniform, though Ontarians seem to be a bit more extroverted than Albertans.



Agreeableness "reflects warmth, compassion, cooperativeness, and friendliness." Rentfrow et al. found that high levels of agreeableness in states correlated with social involvement and religiosity. It was also positively correlated with spending time with friends and having guests over, but negatively with going to bars and joining clubs. Again, Atlanta seems to be a major hub of agreeableness, and it is generally prevalent throughout the South; and again Bos-Ny-Wash and Southern California score low. Greater Toronto and Alberta score slightly lower as well, and Vancouver scores slightly higher.



Neuroticism is characterized by "anxiety, stress, impulsivity, and emotional instability and is related to antisocial behavior, poor coping, and poor health." Unsurprisingly, the Rentfrow et al. study found that highly neurotic states had lower rates of exercise, higher rates of disease, and a shorter life expectancy. In these states, people are less likely to join clubs and spend time with friends. Again, the Northeast represents one of the ends of the spectrum for the distribution of this trait; but in this case it's focused very particularly around the New York City area. There's a secondary neurotic hub around Ohio; the South and West are generally un-neurotic, as is Canada - esepecially Vancouver.



Conscientiousness at the individual level "reflects dutifulness, responsibility, and self-discipline [and] it is positively associated with religiosity" and health-promoting behavior. The South has high levels of conscientiousness; the Northeast, not so much. Southern Ontario and the big cities of California also seem to have lower levels of conscientiousness.



Openness "reflects curiosity, intellect, and creativity at the individual level." Rentfrow et al. found that highly open states had high levels of liberal values, and a disproportionate number of people in the "artistic and investigative professions". People in these areas are more tolerant of homosexuality, more likely to support legalization of marijuana, and more likely to be pro-choice. However, more open states tend to have lower rates of social involvement. and are considerably less religious. "Open" people are concentrated around New York City and the cities of the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego. The South, Midwest, and southern Ontario are less open.

Taking these maps as a whole, what's most remarkable to me is the extent to which the story of the geography of personality in North America is a story about the difference between New York City and Atlanta. Just look at those maps: in the case of every one of the big five personality traits, both of those cities represent one end of the spectrum of the distribution of that trait; and in every case, they represent opposite ends of that spectrum. In other words, both areas are outliers for every trait, and both areas are outliers in opposite directions for every trait. Other parts of North America, like Canada and the interior West, are either generally near the middle of the spectrum for most traits; or, like the Midwest, they share patterns with the Atlanta-centered South or the NYC-centered Northeast depending on the trait. But in every single case, Atlanta and New York City are diametrically opposed to each other. It's fascinating.

"The Mappies"? National Geographic Hands Out Awards

The Map Room links to The National Geographic Map Awards, which are given out to cartographers who produce maps that stand out for technical proficiency and aesthetica quality. Here's a look at the 2008 winners.

Daniel Huffman, of the University of Wisconsin, won for this map of the tallest buildings in Europe between 1895 and 2007.



The size of the clock faces and the numbers on them indicate the number of buildings which were among the 30 tallest in Europe during the given time period. The colered rims indicate the time period and building type of the ranked buildings (e.g., red buildings were religious structures; blues were offices). You can see why it won - a ton of information simply portrayed, and a very broad implied narrative about the social and economic history of Europe over the last century and more. For instance, look at how at the beginning of the period - from "12 o'clock" to "6 o'clock" or even later, the tallest buildings are mostly religious and widespread; there's rarely more than one in any given city. By the time we get to the last few decades, the tallest buildings are almost all office buildings, and they're heavily concentrated in just a handful of cities: Paris, Frankfurt, London, and (though you need to click on the map to see it) Moscow and Istanbul.

Second place went to another UWer, Ben Coakley, for a map of small airline flights in Canada.



There's a certain elegant flourish to those flight paths, no?

Gregg Verutes, of San Diego State, got third place for his flash map of the slums of Accra, Ghana.



This image shows slum density. Verutes' map actually ran a bit slow for me, but then, my computer is rigged out of tin cans and AA batteries, so you might have better luck.

And as a bonus, here's a winner from 2007 - a zoomable map of armed forces sizes by Zachary Johnson, yet another U-Wisconsin mapmaker.



This is not to be confused with a cartogram of general military spending, which looks way different.

Global Warming Melts the Arctic; Nations Lick Their Chops at Potential Oil Bonanza

Via Andrew Sullivan, this map animation from the Economist depicts the shrinking of the Arctic ice, and the brewing competition between the Arctic nations over the region's resources.



The six countries involved - Russia, Canada, the US, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark - are, apparently without irony, determined to lay claim to the oil and natural gas that is becoming increasingly accessible as a warming climate continues to erode the Arctic sea ice.

One of the horrors of addiction is that, as the addictive substance becomes less and less satisfying, and its negative effects mount over time, it becomes even more necessary to consume more of the substance to provide escape from the greater and greater suffering the substance is causing.