Visualization

Variation, Always Variation

December 22, 2014 County

Was running some quick numbers this morning and generated the attached graphic. By State Fiscal Year, it shows the percent change in sales tax distributions by the New York State Department of Tax and Finance to each county outside New York City. The data are indexed with each year showing the percent change from the […]

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Nursing Home Problems Visualized Nationally

October 18, 2013 Dashboard

John Kelly of USA Today and Emily Le Coz of the Jackson (Miss) Clarion-Ledger on USA Today have done an exemplary job of using the latest in data visualization technology to display and enable interactive exploration of nursing home problems. Take a look here! Note the interactivity. Be sure to look at each of the […]

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Information From Another Perspective

May 21, 2012 Visualization

Visualize an eclipse. Now go look at this image. Same data, different angle. This one’s from space. Stunning.

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Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow. What’s the Cost of Ignorance?

April 23, 2012 Cash

Unhappiness is a negative cash flow. Even worse is not knowing what your cash position is. For the past year, I’ve been submitting Freedom of Information (FOIL) requests to Albany County, getting their cash position each week. I’ve been using the data to prototype some displays of public data. It’s not cash flow, but rather […]

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Moneyball: Maybe it’s the Geek in Me. Maybe Because it Saved Me.

February 25, 2012 Data

Tomorrow night’s the Oscar awards ceremony and I have a favorite. We’re movie goers and usually analyze them pretty carefully. Well, even if I didn’t think it was a good movie, Moneyball would be my sentimental favorite. Fortunately, it is a good movie. But I owe them. Here’s why. Michael Lewis has been a favorite […]

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Follow up on Cash Dashboard

February 23, 2012 Cash

Couple of tweaks I’ll be adding to the Cash Dashboard when I get a chance: To track and project cash from a more “organic” perspective, I’ll do a calculated field and display it excluding the borrowed cash from the Tax Anticipation Note (TAN). Though, I haven’t decided on the best means of projection, I’ll some […]

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Which Might be the Better Cash Dashboard?

February 23, 2012 Cash

My on-again, off-again posting is mostly the result of some prototyping and developing analytical tools and visualizations I’m doing with public data. Some are broader, more-policy focused. Others are more nitty-gritty operational. Here are two PDFs of a dashboard I’m working on for that most nitty-gritty of subjects, cash. Here’s an earlier post on its […]

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What Happened to Health Coverage Around 1980, What happened the Last Dozen Years and Why it Still Makes a Difference

December 12, 2011 Economics

Interesting chart (the second one) posted by Lane Kenworthy today and some interesting debates and here on when the US healthcare system performance began to look different from the rest of the world. Kenworthy’s chart depicts the relationship between health expenditures per capita and life expectancy. Here’s my contribution from a while back, while I […]

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Kudos to the NYS State Comptroller, but …

December 9, 2011 Budget

My last post, Yes, Rockland County is in Trouble, was devoted to the release by New York’s Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, of an Audit (PDF) of Rockland’s financial condition. Clearly, the Comptroller and his staff have been watching closely enough to start their audit earlier this year. Good for them. Carefully done audits take time and […]

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Interstate Flows of Federal Funds

August 2, 2011 Expenditures

The Economist has just published an important analysis and graphic, “Where federal taxes are raised and spent,” on which states send more tax money to the Federal government than they receive back in benefits. This is an issue that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to focus an annual analysis on. But to my knowledge it […]

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