With all the excitement and interest in the recent US Presidential elections, it is not surprising that science and technology have been applied to political questions recently. Now there are probably few U.S. citizens who haven't seen the electoral map with blue and red states colored (in the lines) to indicate which nominee received their electoral votes. And many of you have, like me, seen the more detailed CNN map showing the counties which went blue and red (notably, only the major population centers of blue "island" states NM and CO).
But Prof. Mark Newman, a physics professor at the Univ. of Michigan, has combined these maps with demographic information such that the newly distorted map more accurately depicts the number of votes, rather than geographic size, a particular location has to offer. The results are, as CNN and other media outlets have described qualitatively: There are large "islands" of urban and high population density which are blue, surrounded by red concentric circles, outwardly expanding and coalescing in regions of lower population density. These "islands" appear much larger on the new map because of their disproportionately large populations. This map demonstrates not only how Obama was able to win the nation (despite the very red-looking map when observing county poll results), but also how much more balanced we are as a nation in terms of red and blue! Now if only we couldd start seeing some GREEN in there... ;)
I've added a video section on the right where I will be embedding interesting Sci Fri videos as they appear. Science Friday is a production of NPR, their
homepage is here. The original cartogram video is
located here.
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