WorldChanging Seattle: Smaller Homes, Bigger Communities

WorldChanging Seattle: Smaller Homes, Bigger Communities - my interests seem to converge a lot. Reading an article about how small houses are better (which I have been trying to convince people of for some time) on a Seattle (where I now live) website, the article goes on to talk about trying to do the same thing in Toronto.

Sidewalks Can Be Cool Too…So Why Aren’t They? | hugeasscity

Sidewalks Can Be Cool Too…So Why Aren’t They? | hugeasscity - just what I was thinking during a lot of my time in Europe a few months ago.

Canadian Election Analysis: Urban vs Rural

Talking about the urban-vs-rural divide in Canada and the US with my roommate yesterday; today I realized I could actually demonstrate it.

I scraped data from two websites: CBC and Elections Canada, since the latter doesn’t yet have election results. So here’s what I found:

population density vs vote scatterplots

What are you seeing here? Each point is a single riding. The x-axis shows population density. The y-axis shows the votes for that party as a percentage of the votes to the four major national parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green), and the scale is different for each. The Bloc Quebecois are not considered here, since they only participate in Quebec.

As you can see, this data seems to show that the Liberals weakly correlate with high population density, and the Conservatives correlate strongly with low population density. I tried making similar graphs using the logarithm of population density, but that didn’t reveal anything differently.

There’s quite a lot more that can be done with the data I used, you can find it all in this Excel file.

A Guy Who Paints Gum

FlickrBlog: A guy who paints gum - fantastic