

America by the Numbers - wyclif
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/07/us/CENSUS.html

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some1else
The lightweight form of "data-driven journalism". Express delta values instead
of insight. Use clipart instead of info-graphic visualizations.

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jackfoxy
My long-running objection to this kind of quicky journalism exactly. No
detailed attribution, no drill-down availability, no footnotes. I developed
facster.com to overcome these and other limitations, the goal being to provide
research-quality stats from the government and other sources, make the
information searchable, browseable, and joinable. I haven't had the time to do
much work on it since 2005, so the most recent abstract I loaded is from 2003.
Also in some migration the search index got damaged. A lot of search terms are
missing, but I've boosted repairing the search index on my to do list.

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dotcoma
2.4% of people are in jail? Should add that number to the unemployment figures
when bragging about how good the economy is (ops, was) compared to France,
Germany or the Scandinavian countries...

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jat850
It didn't say in jail, it said 7.3 millions incarcerated or on probation or
parole, which is fairly significantly different.

Most recent statistic I could find (on Wikipedia, I did not drill down to
their source) was about 0.75% actually incarcerated. (2.4 million people)

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borism
_It didn't say in jail_

yeah, but being on probation or parole means you're almost in jail, doesn't
it?

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anamax
> yeah, but being on probation or parole means you're almost in jail, doesn't
> it

No.

Note that you can end up on probation without ever being in jail.

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latch
in 2007 airport screeners confiscated 1416 guns?!?!

(the 1.1 million knives isn't as perplexing to me 'cuz [in my mind] there's
way more ambiguity around what's a "knife" than a gun).

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SkyMarshal
I had my spyderco folding knife confiscated. I totally forgot it was in my
backpack. Apparently that happens alot.

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jberryman
Right, and a lot of people carry small pocket knives on their keychains, etc.

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honm
The last table in this one is interesting:
[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0005.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0005.pdf)

