Utah, this is the place

Data can be beautiful, don’t you know?

For instance, I like when I have lots of data in our spreadsheets for our family finances so I can make pretty little charts. The charts are much better, of course, when the lines are going in the right direction: towards more saving, more in retirement, less debt, etc.

We have lots of data at work between tasks, hours, story points, and how many donuts were consumed by this team each week.

Actually, we don’t have that last one, but I’d like to see how it correlates to hours worked. I need funding for this new study.

So I spend some time at reddit.com. It’s a beautiful world, reddit is. If you haven’t ventured into it, once you find the subreddits for you, you’ll find a new love. I follow subreddits like agile, projectmanagement, technology, saltlakecity, latterdaysaints, android, clothdiaps, and funny. Today, I learned about a subreddit called dataisbeautiful.

Let me share with you a few neato images that were among the first links there today. Then you take the time to tell me what you think it means about my home state: Utah. This will be fun. Ready?

1. Birth Rates in US and Mexico

The first one shows you the crude birth rate from 2010 of both the US and Mexico States. (Crude birth rate means the number of live births among the population in a given year.)

2. Babies born to unmarried mothers in the US, over time.

This one’s an animation so take the time to watch as the US changes year after year. It shows you the percentage of babies that were born to unmarried mothers in the United States from 1980 – 2004.

Now, tell me, what did you learn from this? How excellent are these? So how cool data can be?

 

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