My Jay-Z Starter Kit

So, I figured I would try out the new "bling" graphing capability on Swivel. As my maiden graph with bling, I wanted to point out the outrageous prices of U.S. postage stamps and the fact that they should just come out with a $0.50 stamp (so that I can keep them for a few years before they become obsolete). I barely mail anything now with e-billing and gifts sent via Amazon.com. It seems like it is going to be even less likely going forward now that all of my stamps will be useless once again.

Diagnosis of Autism versus Mental Retardation

I was reading a news article a few days ago about the substantial increase in the diagnosed cases of autism in the U.S., and how people were attributing it to mercury contamination in fish, vaccinations, etc. This made me curious and I started looking at some figures and their supporting articles. Now, I will state for the record that I have friends that have worked tirelessly with autistic children, and it is both heart-wrenching and rewarding at the same time. However, with modern medicine, I found it hard to believe that autism was spiking so dramatically, as shown below.



Then I found a plausible explanation for the spike. One set of researchers suggested that for the rise in autism over the past 10 years (I believe roughly 9.3 more cases per 10,000), there was a roughly equal decline in the diagnosed cases of mental retardation (down about 9.1 per 10,000). There is some overlap of around 30% of autistic children that are also mentally retarded, but it seems like an ongoing change in the diagnosis of children's developmental problems seems somewhat more likely than an autism epidemic. I would love if anybody out there has any more information (I know that I will keep looking as well).

How to Make Prescription Drug Prices Equitable for Americans

A while back, I was discussing the inequity of drug prices for Americans versus Canadians, Europeans, etc. It is obvious that Americans pay more for brand name prescription drugs than other nations. However, many people don't realize that Americans pay less for generics than in other countries. This is really a function of the size of the buyers and the amount of pressure that is levied by the government.



Other countries have socialized health care, meaning that there is a single buyer for all of the drugs for every person in the country. In the U.S., it is mostly private health care, or government programs for the less fortunate. Unfortunately, the powers that be in the U.S. are either too scared, too lazy or too disorganized to use their collective buying power to lower the price of prescription drugs in the same manner as they have for generic drugs. Let me make this straight: THE U.S. SUBSIDIZES THE REST OF THE WORLD FOR PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. Pharmaceutical companies collect profits in the U.S. to offset lower profits or losses in the rest of their markets.

A friend of mine had an idea about how to solve this issue. Using the graph above, it is clear that the prices are higher in the U.S., so big pharmaceutical buyers can simply state, we want all countries to have an equal price (based on absolute $, or PPP, or whatever). This would lower the U.S. cost by around 20%, but raise other countries costs by almost 2x. It would realign the issue, and force other countries to pay their fair share for drugs. Basically, realigning around maybe 1.20 on the chart.

It would suck for everyone else, but basically the U.S. is paying for everyone else's socialized medicine, instead of paying for its own people.

I Love My Tivo, and my DVR, and my Slingbox, and....

Nielsen Media posted an interesting report about how people use their digital video recorders, specifically focused on the day of the week the content was recorded, as well as how quickly people play back the content.



I know I love my Tivo/DVRs, and I pretty much use them to: 1)record two programs at once, 2)record programs while I am away, or 3)to skip commercials. So, basically, it looks like I am pretty typical, especially when people watch the majority of their content within two days.

Holy Crap My Source Disappeared

I posted a graph on Swivel a couple of days ago about the market share of U.S. record sales.



I thought it was a pretty interesting graph about how the music business is really in the hands of four companies (soon to be three because WMG is trying to acquire EMI). Anyways, after the announcement from WMG, I wanted to see if there was more from the source of the data. However, when I clicked on the source link, the data was gone. I guess there is a sneaky way of Nielsen and Business Wire of only keeping their press releases available for one month. After that, the data is gone. Not just off the original page, but TOTALLY GONE! I can't find it anywhere. If anyone can find the Nielsen Media press release that has 2006 record sales by company as well as the top polyphonic ringtones for 2006 (all in one release), please tell me.

Swivel Hacks: Part 2

This is not really that much of a hack as it is a courtesy to people that click on Swivel links. In future posts, I am going to hack my Swivel HTML to open the graphs into a new window, rather than forwarding to Swivel in the existing open window. I figure it will allow people to appreciate my content while still showing off the greatness of Swivel. For the HTML newbies out there, it is a pretty simple addition to the existing Swivel code. Just add:

target="_blank"

For example: in the case of one of the cool graphs posted on Swivel about the number of political blogs listed on Technorati shown below:



The code extracted from the "BlogThis" button results in:

a href="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8024548"> img alt="# of them on Technorati by Political Blog Type" src="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/image/8052055" style="border: solid 1px #999999;" title="# of them on Technorati by Political Blog Type" />

but I add target="_blank" like this:

a href="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8024548" target="_blank"> img alt="# of them on Technorati by Political Blog Type" src="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/image/8052055" style="border: solid 1px #999999;" title="# of them on Technorati by Political Blog Type" />

And now it pops. I think I am also going to add the Fark slang "clicky pops" below each graph to make users aware that the link opens in a new window. Just my way of keeping the peace. Happy Swiveling.

A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?

I am sure that many of you have fallen victim to the quick brainteaser: "What is heavier, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?" You only fall for it once, but it is great fun in the schoolyard.

Well, despite the laws of physics, I have another one. "Which has more hydrogen, a liter of hydrogen or a liter of gasoline?" Well, the answer is a liter of gasoline. Of course, after thinking about it, you realize that it all involves the density of the substance. However it does have implications on the alternative energy debate. Hydrogen in its pressurized liquid form has far less energy density per liter than gasoline, even though it is much cleaner burning (excluding all of the debate about the power needs to split water molecules into H and O, etc.)



I really want alternative energy, but if you need a pressurized 54 gallon tank in your Hydrogen vehicle (18 gallons x 3) in order to travel the same approx. 360 mile distance as a gasoline vehicle, I am pretty sure America won't adopt it.

I encourage debate, drop me some comments.

I hate it when.....

I was watching a show last night called Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on the Discovery Channel. The show was highlighting some of the weird foods consumed in Japan, from live frog hearts to lizard sake. Anyways, the food had several info-graphics that popped up throughout the show. Most were interesting, but one caught my eye stating that Japan consumes 1/3 of the world's seafood. Now to put that into perspective, Japan has a population of roughly 130 million vs. the global 6 billion+ (for any math majors out there, that is roughly 2% of global population).

I knew that this was "fishy," pardon the pun, so I checked out the data and uploaded it to Swivel. Turns out, Japan is the largest consumer of fish, but it doesn't appear to have 1/3 of global consumption just looking at the per capita consumption.



Fight bad facts with good facts people. That is all I ask.

Swivel.......Liberating Data

As a fan of Swivel and all of its data goodness, I couldn't help but think of how it is breaking down barriers to information. Well, I threw together a little Photoshop homage to their efforts. Tell me if you like it!

Happy Valentine's Day

I have been hearing that the price of roses goes up for Valentine's Day, but 2007 will be especially pricey for all of the other varieties of flowers because of the recent freeze in central California. Supposedly it wiped out a significant portion of the California flower crop (while roses are usually grown in greenhouses or are imported). However, men can rejoice with the knowledge that flowers are only the fourth most popular form of showing your love on V-day.

Demetri Martin: Findings

I recently watched a recorded Comedy Central special called Demetri Martin:Person. In the special, he had an entire portion devoted to "findings." Basically they were all funny graphs. I had a good laugh and decided to post some of them into Swivel. They are a bit sophomoric in nature, but how often do comedians include graphs in their stand-up routine?

Minimum Wage is Hard Living....

It looks like the $7.25 federal minimum wage increase may get through after being at $5.15 since 1997. There was a graph on Swivel a while back about how the increase just gets minimum wage back inline with inflation.



Overall, I have mixed feelings about this issue. As a former small business owner, I know that wages are the biggest expense in a service business. However, as someone that made minimum wage back in the day, I also know that $7.25 an hour X 2000 hours a year is only $14,500 per year. A minimum wage earner can barely afford housing and food if they don't work two jobs.

I posted the above graph on a forum called "SomethingAwful" a couple of weeks ago during a debate about minimum wage. Surprisingly, I got a mixed bag of responses. Many were supportive of the graph and the suggestion that minimum wage needs to be increased, while the most difficult argument against the graph was whether or not minimum wage was too much relative to living needs in 1979 (and therefore the line didn't need to get back to inflation). I admit, I couldn't back up the graph without doing some serious digging into 1979 living requirements.

If anyone has seen the movie "Thank You for Smoking," you know that you can win a debate without proving you're right, but rather that your opponent is wrong. I guess the debate will continue on.

How Many Californians Does It Take To Change a Lightbulb?

So, recently a California state senator made a announcement that he was going to propose outlawing standard incandescent light bulbs in California by 2012. Furthermore, there was the big announcement by Wal-Mart that they want to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) in 2007. Therefore, I wanted to throw together some data about the differences between standard incandescent light bulbs versus some of the alternatives including halogen and CFLs. The advocates of CFLs suggest that they last longer and use less energy to produce light (or lumens). The relative value of lumens is show below.



CFLs generally use less power because their energy is used to excite the gas in the bulb, versus heating the filament in standard incandescents. I think that this is generally a good idea. However, I still have a few issues with compact fluorescents. First, you can't place them on a dimmer switch. If you ever want to set up some mood lighting for dinner, you can appreciate this. Second, many CFLs give off a very unappealing shade of light, much like your standard classroom lights in school. I hope that both of these can be overcome. Right now, many communities are requiring that new and remodeled homes have CFLs in bathrooms and kitchens, so the issue may be mute (government forced demand). However, I hope that environment and aesthetics can be balanced in the long-term.

The Top 1%

I recently listened to a webcast of a panel about Web 2.0 start-ups. During part of the panel, the former CEO of Jotspot mentioned a Time-CNN poll where 19% of Americans thought they were in the top 1% of income earners. Well, it made me curious, so I looked it up and threw together a graph. Needless to say, you need to be making some serious coin to break into the top 1%. The top line is the top 1%, followed by 5%, 10%, and top 20%.



If you aren't flirting with a quarter-million per year, you aren't quite there yet.

Swivel Hacks

OK, so I have been trying to post Swivel graphs onto a few places that I go online. Some areas are easier than others. However, I have overcome most of the issues with a few hacks. Here is a breakdown of some of the ways to get Swivel graphs onto forums run by VBulletin (OffTopic, SomethingAwful), as well as onto MySpace.

When you get a good Swivel graph, and you want to post it somewhere else you need to click on the "Blog This" button underneath the graph. However, before you click it, you may want to note the graph number on the URL. In this case I will use the example of a government funding graph that looks like this,



and is located at this URL "http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/6140953"

In this case the graph number is 6140953.

OK, next, click the "Blog This" button, which will take you to an interface that will allow you to custom change the graph to fit your page. If you have a black background, you can go under the style options and change the color, etc. Now here is where it gets important. If you are posting to MySpace, you want to have the graph no bigger than 400 pixels wide, so make sure you click that.

Once you get your colors, width, etc. finished, then you can copy the "Embed this graph" information at the top. However, you may need to copy and paste this onto a word document in order to hack the URL. Each time you click "Blog This" you get a brand new code, so don't try to use the one I post below.

'a href="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/6140953">'img alt="US Government Funding" src="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/image/6236146" style="border: solid 1px #99BA96;" title="US Government Funding" />

If you post to Blogger/BlogSpot, or a weblog like Fark.com, you can use the code straight from Swivel.

However, you may need to hack if you are posting to a forum like OffTopic, SomethingAwful, or any forum powered by VBulletin. You need to take the following from the Swivel code and reformat it. Take the graph number from the original URL you copied (in this case 6140953), and paste it into the following formula at the end of the first line.

[url=http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/6140953]
[img]http://www.swivel.com/graphs/image/6236146[/img][/url]

Then take the second numerical sequence in the "Blog This" code (in this case 6236146 from two paragraphs up) and copy it into the second line of the formula directly above. The resulting formula can be pasted into any VBulletin post and will paste the appropriate graph that is linked to Swivel.

If you want to post to your Myspace page, you need to slightly alter the "Blog This" code by adding some letters into the code. This results in:

a href="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/6140953">'img alt="US Government Funding" src="http://www.swivel.com/graphs/image/6236146.png" style="border: solid 1px #99BA96;" title="US Government Funding" />

I usually add two breaks (just type "<" "br" ">" without the quotation marks) in front and the term ".png" after the second numerical sequence in the "Blog This" code. Now, you can now drop that whole term into your "About Me" portion of your profile page, or into a blog posting on Myspace.
OK, that is all for me. Happy Swiveling!

The Coming and Going of the Super Bowl

Well, the Super Bowl has come and gone, but in comparison to the past several years, I found this year's ads to be somewhat lacking. Given that this year set a record for advertising at $2.6 million for 30 seconds, you would hope that someone would really be focusing on producing a quality product.



According to USA Today, the Budweiser crabs worshiping the ice chest was the number one favorite. It isn't to much of a surprise that Budweiser and Bud Light commercials were 7 of the top 10 favorites. Especially given beverages are always among the top number of advertisements.



I personally was rooting for Chicago Bears, but just like my own California Golden Bears, they started strong and ended with a whimper. Even though they were underdogs by seven points in the spread, I was still hoping for a win based on some good old voodoo statistics (like distance from the Super Bowl venue, which suggested Chicago would win).



I mean, Chicagoans need to drive through Indianapolis to get to Miami, it's that much further north. Oh well, there is always next year.