America by the Numbers

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/07/us/CENSUS.html

by wyclif • 16 years ago

31 16 16 years ago

latch• 16 years ago

in 2007 airport screeners confiscated 1416 guns?!?!

(the 1.1 million knives isn't as perplexing to me 'cuz [in my mind] there's way more ambiguity around what's a "knife" than a gun).

klbarry• 16 years ago

In a reddit Ask Me Anything post a TSA screener mentioned how his area alone found 1-2 guns a month and a few knives/screwdrivers a day.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

I had my spyderco folding knife confiscated. I totally forgot it was in my backpack. Apparently that happens alot.

jberryman• 16 years ago

Right, and a lot of people carry small pocket knives on their keychains, etc.

borism2• 16 years ago

so what is a gun? maybe a lot of those were toy guns (definitely not allowed on a plane).

some1else• 16 years ago

The lightweight form of "data-driven journalism". Express delta values instead of insight. Use clipart instead of info-graphic visualizations.

jackfoxy• 16 years ago

My long-running objection to this kind of quicky journalism exactly. No detailed attribution, no drill-down availability, no footnotes. I developed facster.com to overcome these and other limitations, the goal being to provide research-quality stats from the government and other sources, make the information searchable, browseable, and joinable. I haven't had the time to do much work on it since 2005, so the most recent abstract I loaded is from 2003. Also in some migration the search index got damaged. A lot of search terms are missing, but I've boosted repairing the search index on my to do list.

mtr• 16 years ago

In addition the data isn't normalized. The rate of something could be decreasing year-over-year but due to population increase the quantity continues to increase. Ignoring the normalized data helps journalists create sensationalistic headlines.

protomyth• 16 years ago

As "journalism" I find it lacking, but it might be fun to write a web widget that would put one stat delta per day.

dotcoma• 16 years ago

2.4% of people are in jail? Should add that number to the unemployment figures when bragging about how good the economy is (ops, was) compared to France, Germany or the Scandinavian countries...

mike-cardwell• 16 years ago

That figure sounds insanely high. Can anyone confirm it?

sorbus• 16 years ago

It's might be low[1]: in 2007, 1 in 31 adults were in prison[2] - 3% of the population. However, that may include all the people on probation, as wikipedia gives the number in 2009 as only 1 in 136 actually being incarcerated[3], with perhaps five times that being on parole or probation (from one of the graphs, in 2008).

[1] Low by American standards, at least.

[2] http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=19911

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...

jat850• 16 years ago

It didn't say in jail, it said 7.3 millions incarcerated or on probation or parole, which is fairly significantly different.

Most recent statistic I could find (on Wikipedia, I did not drill down to their source) was about 0.75% actually incarcerated. (2.4 million people)

borism2• 16 years ago

It didn't say in jail

yeah, but being on probation or parole means you're almost in jail, doesn't it?

honm• 16 years ago

The last table in this one is interesting: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0005.p...

America by the Numbers

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