September 5, 2010

Dose driving make you fat??

I always knew that this could be the reason!! but recently found this map-  Driving is why you are fat! The map shows statewise how people get to work everyday and what is state's obesity ranking. Ranking is done for 50 states plus District of Columbia.


A map analyst inside me couldn’t help noticing a weird ranking system that is #1 in obesity is the place with minimum obese. The other thing I bumped into is some of the states have high drive rank as well as high walk/bike rank (eg: AL, MS, LA, OK), wouldn’t the higher rank for walking and biking mean a lower rank for driving as ranks are given by percentage of total population of state. I even don’t like the dull boring color combination used in the map!


Still, it is a decent map even if the details aren’t completely logical. The idea of block style presentation of statistic is nice for the evenness. This way smaller size state can also be focused similarly. Although the relation between the obesity and mode of communication is very obscure, this kind of map can be made for obesity in relation to food consumed, average Income or general economy. However, this particular map gives good representation of the different modes of transportations.

2 comments:

  1. i don't like how hey tried to make this map look like the periodic table as of they were trying to pass off they're findings as scientific dogma. Though, if I'm reading this right, Colorado is one of the most fit states which is true...at least outside that very odd FT.Collins area.

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  2. Oh ,FT is an abbreviation for Fort. Fort Collins is the name of a town in Colorado that is noted for it's less then normal population. The people there are just kind of nutty.

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