Unemployment Update

Back in March, I posted some maps about unemployment in the US. While for the most part it looked good, several states showed a worrying "double-dip" trend. It appears that these concerns were unfounded as March and April turned out to be very good months for employment figures.


Now 37 states are showing improvement, while only 4 show unemployment getting worse. While there are 3 states double-dipping, they are totally different from the ones that appeared to double-dip earlier indicating that it's probably just a temporary set back.

I decided to do another type of map for this update. I was curious to see how much better states have gotten since the peak in unemployment to see if some are doing better than others. However, to give it more context, I had to see how bad they got in the first place. So for each state I compared their lowest unemployment rate prior to the recession to their highest unemployment during the recession.


The scale is done by multiples, so Florida, Idaho, and Nevada had an unemployment more than 3.5 times higher than prior to the recession while Alaska's unemployment increased by less than 1.5 times or 50%. Florida saw the most dramatic increase, going from 3.3% unemployment in 2006 to 12% in 2010.

Since then though, conditions have improved in every state but Louisiana, so comparing their pre-recession best to their current, the map looks like this:


So none of the states are doing better than they were prior to the recession, but Alaska, New Hampshire, and North Dakota are getting closer. Nevada and Illinois have shown a lot of improvement, having changed two ranks.

Peace Corps

Since I don't know where I'm going yet I decided to do some speculating. Based on my qualifications, out of the 70 "countries" Peace Corps sends volunteers to, there are 32 that I'm likely to end up. I say "countries" because they list Eastern Caribbean as one entity as well as Micronesia and Palau. The count also includes 3 countries where there are currently no volunteers.

Many countries only have education and health programs, which I am not qualified for. Also much of the Americas is off limits as I don't speak Spanish.

Dark Gray-Countries I'm not qualified for
Light Blue-Countries I'm likely to go to
Dark Blue-The 10 countries with the most volunteers that I'm likely to go to


Based on the current level of volunteers, my estimate for where I'll end up:
Ukraine (the country with the most volunteers) 11%
Africa 53%
Vanuatu 2%
Any Pacific island 4%
Any island nation 10%

How Azerbaijan Won

There has been a lot of discussion lately about how Azerbaijan won the recent Eurovision Song Contest. It seems that the general opinion was that it was a bland, forgettable song. So who voted for it? Actually, not all that many people.

Eurovision voting rules are a perfect example of one of the problems of first-pass-the-post voting. It makes it possible that a minority choice ends up winning. In the Eurovision Final there are 25 choices. This theoretically makes it possible that an entry could win the coveted 12 points with just over 4% of the overall vote.

Eurovision's scoring system also distorts the results. The winning song in a country could receive 20% of the vote while the second place song got 10%. Even though the second place song got half as many votes, it will receive 10 points while the winning song got 12. This makes the contest more competitive by handicapping the best performers. Now consider that Azerbaijan averaged 6th place and its easy to see that they could have received a lot of points while not actually receiving all that many votes.

Statistics on ESC Chat reveal more. Azerbaijan won with smallest amount of possible votes of any winning act under the current voting system, which has been in place since 1975. Overall, Azerbaijan won only 9% of the points assigned while back in 2009 Norway won with a landslide of 16%. That might not seem like a big difference, but the thing to consider is that Norway won first place in 16 countries while Azerbaijan only won in 3. Since the scoring system effectively handicaps entries that do really well by limiting the number of points it can get to a maximum of 12, Norway likely did much better its 16% would imply while Azerbaijan did worse than its 9% implies.

What does this all mean? When there isn't a clear favorite like in 2009 and 2010, the winner of Eurovision is really just a matter of chance. A relatively small number of votes can drastically change the outcome. It will be interesting to see the separated jury and televote scores once they become available as it's completely possible that Azerbaijan could have won the combined scores without actually winning the jury vote or the televote.

More Demographics

Interactive Map of Census Data from the New York Times

I was browsing Census data, as I'm wont to do, and notice something kind of interesting. I've made some earlier posts about how non-Hispanic Whites (for brevity, simply referred to as "White" from here on out) will not longer be the majority in the not so distant future, so I expect the population growth of minorities to outpace the growth of the White population. What I didn't expect though was to find that the white population is actually declining in a number states.

States with a declining White population:
California
Connecticut
Illinois
Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Mississippi
New Jersey
New York
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island

This got me wondering, with so many states seeing a declining white population, where is population growth coming from?

Population change 2000-2010
Total: 27.3 million
Hispanic: 15.2 million
Asian: 4.3 million
Black: 3.7 million
White: 2.3 million
Multiple: 1.4 million
Others: 0.4 million

Hispanics made up 55.5% of population change while representing only 16.3% of the total population. Whites only made up 8.3% of population change despite representing 63.7% of the total population. Even the Black and Asian populations saw a greater absolute increase in population.

Overall, the population of the US increased by 9.7%. The Hispanic population increased by 43%, followed closely by the Asian population which grew by 42.9%. The White population only grew by 1.2%. It seems that without migration, US population trends would more closely match those of most European states.

Address Bar Guesses

Like so many things these days, the Firefox address bar attempts to guess what sites I want to visit based on what I start typing. I decided to see what sites are the ones that come up first with each letter of the alphabet.

A - APDC Interpreters Bank I'm currently working on a project with them

B - Blackboard School stuff

C - CBC Canadian election news

D - Dominosa Puzzle game I no longer play

E - Etymonline.com Etymology dictionary

F - Facebook

G - Gmail

H - Hack Slash Crawl Flash game I no longer play

I - Institutional Research Board School stuff

J - Jay is Games Causal gaming site

K - Kayak Flight finder

L - Slither Link Puzzle game

M - Mu Cow Self-referential!

N - Nurikabe Puzzle game

O - Orisinal Flash games

P - Penrose Library Campus library

Q - Quest Diagnostics From when I was being medically cleared for the Peace Corps

R - RTE Irish election news

S - Sporcle Quiz games

T - The Cinema Snob Videos of reviews of bad movies

U - US Election Atlas Information on past US elections

V - Valmyndigheten Information on past Swedish elections

W - Wachovia

X - Google Reader The Local's RSS feed

Y - YouTube

Z - Google Account Logout Warning, this link will cause you to log out of your Google account.

I'm personally entertained that four of these deal with elections.