Pittsburgh Neighborhood Information

Part 1:
My three of interest include population, employment & occupation, housing

Part 2 (LATCH):
Population
Location: Pittsburgh overall, Pittsburgh neighborhoods individually
Category: age, race, employment status
Hierarchy: population by age (highest to lowest), population by location (highest to lowest)

Employment & occupation
Location: Pittsburgh overall, Pittsburgh neighborhoods individually
Category: gender, occupation, employed vs. unemployed
Hierarchy: most/least employed by location

Housing
Location: Pittsburgh overall, Pittsburgh neighborhoods individually
Category: type of household, household size, age of owner/renter
Hierarchy: most/least housing by type, size & householder

Part 3 (temporal map):


Part 4 (groupings):
(working on now)


Source of information

Data

Here's the data I collected about foods and special diets. I may add to the food list as I discover more foods that are common and diversify the information set.

Sorry about the crappy screencaps! (Click on them and they'll get bigger)

LATCH:

Location— Make a "map" of common foods according to type

Alphabetical— List foods and/or diets alphabetically

Time— Ability to display different diet sets at the same time or at different times

Category— Types of diets/types of foods.

Hierarchy— Grouping foods by type, closer together meaning more closely related (e.g. grouping all fruits together but then grouping all citrus fruits more closely)

Wealth Disparity Data - idea 1

Below are stats for the celebrity-to-you wealth comparison. There actually aren't that many stats because most of the interaction of the data will be happening through a simple formula.

Their annual salary/your annual salary = number of years you would have to work

Comparisons will be done with:
Your salary (or any salary you decide to type in)
Time, measured in years, and potentially with a significant historical event to add some flavor.
Annual Income of celebrities.

As this is kind of an exploratory "fun" interactive, I think I am not going to categorize the celebrities outright... granted there are some implied categories, politicians, moguls, etc, but I'm not sure that it's important to emphasize these. Additionally, if I were to add a wealth hierarchy, that would take away some of the "fun" of discovering how rich people really are as you use the interactive.



I sourced these through Businessweek, CNN and the Harvard Business School

Implementation
So I know that this is jumping ahead, but I actually got on a roll with this the other night and mocked up a way that this could be implemented:


The overall goal here was to compare earnings of people we all know with our own personal scale - in this case working for an entire year. The crazy thing is, even if you make $150,ooo a year, you would still have to work almost 28,000 years to make what Bill Gates does in 1.

Overpopulation - Effects & Solutions

Much of this isn't new, but this is the "official", cleaned-up version of my project proposal.

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I think everyone is well aware of the steep increase in the world’s population. I can still remember the big hype surrounding the birth of the world’s 6 billionth baby, and now we’re up to around 6.8 billion already. These statistics are simply mind-blowing.

The Problem At Hand
Researchers from a variety of disciplines have suggested that many of the problems we are facing today, such as pollution, natural resource depletion and global climate change, can be directly linked to this sharp population increase. But if this is the case, then people’s efforts seem to have been primarily going toward trying to eliminate the detrimental effects, rather than trying to attack the problem at its source. Even if we somehow manage to reduce pollution, develop alternative energy sources, and halt climate change, in the end, we haven’t really accomplished anything until we’ve tackled the true issue, which is our rapidly-increasing population.

Context & Audience Affected
Since the issues described above affect us on a global scale, it can be argued that the audience consists of everyone everywhere in the world. However, since the scope of the problem itself is huge and such a large audience has varying needs and interests, I intend to narrow my focus somewhat. The people I am most interested in targeting are those who, in my opinion, have the best opportunity to do something about it: people in the developed world who are able to and possibly considering having children.

It is my personal opinion that people are having too many babies—not just in places like Africa, where birth control is limited, but even in the U.S., where people have technology on their side and it is more socially acceptable for women to make various choices on their own with regard to pregnancy. To solve the problem of our rapidly growing world population, I don’t think that bringing birth control and sex education to Africa and the rest of the Third World is enough. I think a complete change in people’s mindsets is in order. I’m not saying that people should stop giving birth entirely, but I don’t understand why adoption isn’t more widespread than it is.

Goals & Opportunities
My goal is not to preach to my audience, but to present them with three different data sets (world population growth statistics and birth rates, adoption rates, and some generalized facts about environmental changes) and hope that this presentation of the issue will encourage people to think about it in a way they haven’t before—that we are rapidly overpopulating the earth, and that adoption is one of the best solutions.

Project Approach
Since most of this information can be represented through numerical statistics that are constantly changing, I imagine the representation taking the form of an interactive chart or graph on a computerized device. In order to avoid information overload, the data might be presented in layers, where the user, through a menu of sorts, can gradually add more data to the graph as desired. In this way, the user can not only compare all three data sets at once, but also compare one data set in isolation (for example, population growth), as well as two out of the three data sets (such as population growth vs. adoption statistics).

Wealth Disparity Proposal

JD Vogt
Topic proposal for Information Interaction Fall - 08.

Wealth Disparity

What is the current problem and why is it important?
I'd like to tackle the issue of wealth disparity either in the US or the World. I've read various articles over the years and have seen charts that show the distribution of the "have's" vs. the "have nots." Literature has shown that the vast majority of wealth in the US is tied up in a very small segment of the population. My sense is that this leads to an increasingly undemocratic society.

There are plenty of charts and statistics that show the disparity of wealth among our population, but I'd like to humanize it a bit more. If I can show a distinct disparity between us as individuals… perhaps it will have a different impact. Or if I can better visually show the disparity in terms of overall mass between the various groups, and particularly how it has changed over time.


To whom is it important?
Wealth is something that affects all of us, not only our individual lives, but our culture as well. We idolize the rich and want to be like them. My audience would be those who have an interest in not only their own wealth, but those who are interested in doing something about the inequality that exists, hopefully policy makers.

In what context is it important?
I believe that while we sometimes see these sort of statistics, and may know that some people are very, very rich, that it's hard to get one's head around exactly what that sort of wealth means. For instance, if I can afford 1/4 of a Lamborghini, how many can Steve Jobs afford?

What do you want to achieve and what opportunities exist?
I'd like to bring awareness of how the wealthy dominate our economy, laws and culture and use their wealth to maintain their position. I should state that I have nothing against people achieving wealth. However, I am concerned with so much capital being tied up in the hands of so few. Particularly when some of those few break or change the rules as it suits them. This has a "cheating" effect on our society - where we look up to people whose actions can be ethically questionable. (Good for me, but not for thee) I found this article particularly telling of the disparity that exists.

Today the top 1% of households receives more pretax income than the bottom 40%. And the distribution of wealth is even more lopsided. The top 1% of households owns nearly 40% of total household wealth -- more than the bottom 90% of households combined -- and earns half of all capital income. Income and wealth are more unevenly distributed among Americans than at any time since the Jazz Age of the 1920s. On measures of income and wealth inequality, the U.S. tops the charts among the advanced industrial nations. BusinessWeek Nov. 1, 2004

Approach
I've sketched a number of ideas to demonstrate how this would work out. Some are more whimsical than others. Ideas have ranged from:

• Comparing your own wealth to those of the rich and famous. For instance, how many years would you have to work for 1 day's pay compared to Oprah or Bill Gates. You type in your annual income and choose a person to compare yourself to. Could also include those much less fortunate for comparison purposes.
• Graphically showing the magnitude and mass of wealth that belongs to the top 10-1% compared to the population as a whole. Use sliders to show how those values have changed in the last 50 years.
• Create "giant heads" (with tiny bodies) in a sort of police line-up of various industry moguls where the size of their heads reflect the volume of their net worth.
• A globe where the major geographical areas of the world (North America for instance) change as a percentage of global size based on buttons pressed such as World Population, Net Worth, and GDP.

Project Proposal

Over the last year or two I have become increasingly aware of the complex array of diets that people restrict themselves to, either because of allergies or due to a specific set of beliefs. This topic began to interest me as I started taking vegetarianism seriously, while at the same time discovering and dealing with an assortment of allergies. I also noticed the crossovers of foods that I can eat as well as my other friends who have other allergy or otherwise restricted diets.

Despite the fact that food companies are required to print a warning below the ingredients list if a food contains any of the eight most common allergens (milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat), this step does not solve the problem completely. Many problem ingredients can be hidden in foods under confusing chemical names. Also, there are people that have more uncommon, yet still serious allergies which are not required to be listed in ingredients.

I'd like to demonstrate the crossovers in these diets by first representing a typical American diet by looking at all the food in my own and other people's kitchens. I plan to organize this food by type and then show which foods fit into which diets. Diets I am considering representing include kosher, halal, vegan, vegetarian, peanut allergy, gluten allergy, dairy-free, as well as my own diet.

The audience for this piece would be anyone who is attempting to navigate the confusing landscape of foods while maintaining one or more specific diets. I also would like this piece to serve as an illustration to show how limited some people must be in their food choices, it being a matter of life or death for some. Ideally, I'd like to see this piece take a digital form so that a user could select as many allergies or diet tracts that they may follow and be shown a guide to "safe" foods for them.

Proposal Draft 1

Here is my first stab at the project propsal. Still a very broad topic.



Also, here is the information I've found.

World Population Growth and Adoption

My apologies for my tardiness. I've had an idea in mind since class met on Tuesday, and one that I am actually quite passionate about, but it took me a while to really mold it into a concrete topic and then do the necessary footwork to see if it's worth pursuing. I spent quite a bit of time in the library over the weekend trying to figure out if this has been done before. Though I'm certainly not the first to research this, visual representations seem to be lacking, so I do get the impression that my topic might be worth giving a shot.

The idea that came to mind almost instantly when I heard about the project has to do with global population growth. It is my personal opinion that people are having too many babies--not just in places like Africa, where birth control is limited, but even in the U.S., where people have technology on their side and it is more socially acceptable for women to make various choices on their own with regard to pregnancy. At any rate, I think everyone is well aware of the steep increase in the world's population. I can still remember the big hype surrounding the birth of the world's 6 billionth baby, and now we're up to around 6.8 billion already. These statistics are simply mind-blowing.

Researchers from a variety of disciplines have suggested that many of the problems we are facing today, such as pollution, natural research depletion and global climate change, can be directly linked to this sharp population increase. But if this is the case, then people's efforts seem to have been primarily going toward trying to eliminate the detrimental effects, rather than trying to attack the problem at its source. Even if we somehow manage to reduce pollution, develop alternative energy sources, and halt climate change, in the end, we haven't really accomplished anything until we've tackled the true issue, which is our rapidly-increasing population.

I don't think that bringing birth control and sex education to Africa and the rest of the Third World is enough. I think a complete change in people's mindsets is in order. Again, this is my personal opinion, but I don't understand why people in the developed world are still clinging onto this mindset that they absolutely have to have babies. I'm not saying that people should stop giving birth entirely, but I don't understand why adoption isn't more widespread than it is. I feel like it would solve a lot of our problems, and people still get to experience the joy of raising a child.

Anyway, personal rants and opinions aside, I think that there is definitely something of interest to be gained by meshing these three data sets (population growth/birth rate, adoption statistics, and a little bit of statistical data about general environmental problems and changes). The only thing I wasn't sure about is whether this would make my information seem inherently biased--because I realize that I would, even by simply presenting facts about adoption rates, seem to be encouraging adoption. For that reason, I briefly considered leaving adoption out of the equation and making my project just about population growth vs. environmental effects, hoping that people will make the connection on their own that perhaps they should have fewer babies, but I feel like that's less interesting (and, you could argue, still somewhat inherently biased). I don't feel like I'm preaching, just providing my own spin on the interpretation of this data, so if I have a choice, I'd like adoption to remain a part of the focus.

What do other people think? Would it be problematic for me to present a slightly controversial set of data in an arguably slightly biased manner? The project outline didn't really specify that we're required to remain objective, so I had a hard time figuring out whether this is an acceptable topic or not.