America’s Most Irish Towns

On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish. But what about the rest of the year? Twenty-two million Americans — 7.2% of the population – say their “primary ancestry” is Irish, according to the Census’s American Community Survey. Another 13.5 million Americans claim at least some Irish ancestry, bringing the total to 35.5 million Americans — 11.6% of the population — with at least partial Irish ancestry. If that sounds low, remember that Ireland’s population today is just 6.4 million – 4.6 million in the Republic of Ireland and 1.8 million in Northern Ireland. So there are more than 5 times as many Americans with at least partial Irish ancestry as there are people who live in Ireland.

Read more… http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/03/15/americas-most-irish-towns/

A Booklover’s Map of Literary Geography circa 1933

Two of my great loves — maps and books — converged on my friend Wendy‘s wall, where I spotted this stunning vintage map of “literary geography.” Titled The Booklovers Map of America Showing Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography and created by pictorial cartographer Paul M. Paine in 1933, the map zooms in on the biggest literary cities and places “The Birthplace of American Literature” squarely in the Boston/Cambridge area.

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Diversity in the 113th Congress Plotted On a Map

The 113th Congress convened for the first time last week, and the freshman class has been billed as particularly diverse. But overall, the House of Representatives is still mostly white and mostly male.

As of the first day of the new Congress, there were 439 members of the House: 433 voting members and six non-voting delegates (two voting seats are currently empty: Illinois Democrat Jesse Jackson resigned after winning re-election in November and South Carolina Republican Tim Scott resigned on January 2 to step in to James DeMint’s vacated Senate seat.) There are some stats that sound great without context — 81 are women, 42 are African-American, two are American Indian, 11 are Asian-American, and 35 are Hispanic, according to the House Press Gallery. Unfortunately that’s just shy of a third of the entire House (as some members fall under more than one).

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Climate-Proofing The Insurance Industry

The world’s largest reinsurer has examined the recent rise in the number and severity of natural disasters worldwide, and finds the trend bears the unmistakable fingerprints of climate change.

What’s more, America is bearing the brunt of that change.

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Fascinating wind map shows wind vectors from Hurricane Isaac in near real time!

Click through to see near real time wind action.

Predicted paths - Hurricane Isaac (August 26, 2012) & Hurricane Katrina (August 26, 2005):

What are Americans Reading? Top Political Books in each of the United States

State of the States on Obesity, Insurance, Poverty and ACA Medicaid Expansion.

I will never view Ohio the same.

As part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, the Department of the Interior, in partnership with the Department of Energy, will publish the Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for solar energy development in six southwestern states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The final Solar PEIS represents a major step forward in the permitting of utility-scale solar energy on public lands throughout the west.

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Simply stunning in live action.

Go see the live action wind map by clicking here.

What’s the Big Idea? 

The gridlock in Washington last year that brought the nation to the brink of a credit default was only the latest symptom of a widespread – though not irreversible – cultural trend toward fragmentation and tribalism, and away from civil discourse.

We’ve all noticed it - on television and the social web, an increase in politically partisan polemic and cultural isolationism - a sense that lines are being drawn, and we’re expected to choose sides. 

This “us vs. them” mentality doesn’t reflect the best of America, past or present, says author and  essayist Marilynne Robinson, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer prize in Fiction for her novel Gilead. Robinson has traveled widely in the country, and is continually impressed with the resilience and dynamism of America - its ability to assimilate and engage with new ideas and unfamiliar ways of being.

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Should I buy an electric car?
It depends on where you live, says a new report because some states force you to charge up from a dirty coal grid. But that’s just a snapshot, and the long-term outlook favors EVs.

Where are the science communicators interactive map of 1000 #scicomm twitterers?

In anticipation of our science communication event this month, we’ve been thinking about the topic which is discussed using the #SciComm hashtag on Twitter. We started looking at more than 5000 Twitter status updates tagged with #SciComm from the last nine months and found that the group is scientifically diverse but singular in their passion to improve the way information is exchanged. Because #SciComm is not a high volume hashtag, commercial tools to find users aren’t sufficient, so we looked to our own data and some publicly available tools. We created an interactive map of 1000+ Twitterers using the #SciComm hashtag and present the some of the data here.

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The Media Map: Who’s Reading What And Where

We worked with Bitly and its data on millions of Web clicks to find the most influential media outlets in the country. This map shows which news sources are read and shared at above-average levels by state. Roll over and click on the media outlets below to see where they influence readers and which stories were big hits. Updated monthly to reflect the latest trends.