Last week we put up the newly redesigned Social Explorer website. We have have improved the look and feel, navigation and added a new section called ‘Help’ which contains documents and examples on how to use Social Explorer. The help section was written and illustrated by Zanna Hendrey.

We hope you enjoy the new site!

Andrew Beveridge was recently interviewed by the New York Observer’s real estate editor.  Below is the start, and here is a link to the full interview.

http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/beveridge-fizzy-future

Location: The theme that unites the Mayor’s 2030 PlaNYC is that the city will grow by about one million people in the next 25 years. Do you agree?

Mr. Beveridge: It’s an interesting thing because the way they framed it was that it’s inevitable that the city’s going to grow that much. … If you take a look at it, that isn’t that much growth, percentage-wise, since they have it over 30 years.

So what happens in 20 years? How big is the city?

It will be bigger. Unless something bad happens! Then it will be smaller.

The School Divide Starts at Kindergarten

The recent baby boom in New York City led to an increasing squeeze in the search for the best school for the budding kindergartner or first grader. Unlike other recent spurts in enrollment, the latest surge has had the great effect in Manhattan, especially among highly affluent non-Hispanic white families

The number of white toddlers (ages 0 to 4) in the city has increased greatly. In decades past, white families and more affluent families would often leave New York City for the suburbs, where the schools were small and elite (at least according to who lived there) and open to all residents. Now more of these families prefer to stay in New York City.

The impacts of the new trend are reverberating throughout New York City’s elementary schools — public and private, elite and neighborhood. One of the city’s top elementary schools, Hunter, saw 1,550 children apply for 48 slots. The large increase in students sitting for the private school exams document that this is indeed the year of the crunch.

Many affluent parents have seen public school Gifted and Talented programs as a viable - and free — alternative to private schools, but critics have long maintained the system unfairly favored these children, shortchanging those in poorer black and Hispanic areas. This year the city adopted a standardized test with uniform standards to select those eligible. However, we now know that this method resulted in a much less diverse program according to the New York Times.

Finally, just getting ones child into a neighborhood school seems to have turned into a difficult process for some. Confusion, competition for limited slots and changes in the selection methods for the relatively few desirable elementary programs seem to be the order of the day.

Read More http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/demographics/20080626/5/2566

We have started a mailing list for Social Explorer!

Our plan is to send out a simple news-letter email to our mailing list subscribers four to six times a year. This way we can keep you informed about new developments and data releases at Social Explorer, but not overwhelm your inbox. We hope you join.

Sign up here!

To anyone look for an apartment in New York’s City “free market,” affordable housing can seem to be an oxymoron. While a well-known real-estate developer recently claimed that any housing rented or sold in New York City was affordable to the particular renter or purchaser, when the usual standards are applied many New Yorkers live in unaffordable conditions.

Generally, affordable means spending no more than 30 percent of household income on housing. For a household with an income of $100,000, affordable housing then would mean rent, utilities and other charges (but not phone and cable) or mortgage, maintenance and utilities would amount to no more than $2,775 per month. For New Yorkers at 80 percent of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development median ($56,570), which the department considers the top of lower income, the figure would be about $1,575.

Read more here: http://gothamgazette.com/article/demographics/20080515/5/2524

We have added a new feature to export Social Explorer slide shows to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Here is how it’s done:

Fist, you must be logged in either directly or by IP range.
1. click File->New Slide show
2. add a few slides
3. click File->Export to PowerPoint
4. set presentation title then click OK
5. wait while our system produces the slide show.

fig 1. Creating and exporting a slide show to PowerPoint.

fig 2. Enter presentation title and click OK to export.

fig 3. Save or Open the PowerPoint presentation.

Now that you have your presentation in PowerPoint, you can set slide transition property to move to next slide every x seconds. In fig. 4, I set the presentation to move to next slide every second, thereby animating the slide show. This works really well when you have maps over time. For example, you can show how U.S. grew from 1790 to 2000.

fig 4. Set Advance slide property to all slides in the presentation. This will automatically move to next slide every x seconds when the presentation is running.

Sample Presentation: Download 1790-2000 Population Density

Thanks to the good folks at the Opera Software company, we now support Opera Browser version 8 and 9. Opera used to report itself as MSIE in the navigator.appName() javascript function prior to release 9, so when they switched to identifying themselves as Opera, our scripts were a bit off.

Another important update! Map version 12.6 release displays missing values with cross hatched lines and features that are not populated enough to compute a statistically significant outcome (our rule is less than 100 population count) are colored light gray.

Fig. 1 - Census tracts 1950, % Black Population. Notice New Jersey has missing data so it is crossed out, and some tracts in NY are grayed out because not enough people live there.

Over the weekend we updated maps to version 12.6. A few minor tweaks and additions, but they will make your map viewing more pleasant. We updated the streets layer to blend into the map a bit more and we are now using a single color for all streets so it is easier to distinguish them from other map features. I won’t bore you with details but take a look at the difference between version 12.5 and 12.6.

ver. 12.5

ver. 12.6

We have been working on this data release for many months now, creating census tables, variables, maps, meta data and everything in between. Working with these historical data is hard because there are inconsistencies, some missing data, malformed table structures and other gotchas. Sometimes the data just don’t add up, and there is little you can do about it. But by and large, things came together very well. We really did not skimp on anything; we invested massive amounts of time making fine adjustments. How fine? Consider coming up with concise table titles and keeping them consistent over 15 decades of data. Even that seemingly simple task is actually pretty hard given that the questions keep changing thought the decades.

We are currently cross-checking the data for consistency and making sure everything adds up properly. We will likely bring these datasets out of beta very quickly because we have already done so much testing.

It is exciting and inspiring to finally see Andrew Beveridge’s vision, of visualizing U.S. from 1790 to 2000, come to life!

We hope you enjoy it!