In order to maintain consistency, counties that were newly split apart during these 35 years were kept intact in the analysis. This is most noticeable in Virginia, where many cities are administratively independent from counties but have the same mortality rates as the county surrounding them because they were evaluated together.Anyone like to comment on that, in VA and generally?
I guess it's "deaths per 100k if we scale so that each county has the same demographics" and nothing more than that.
I've never done that type of work, but conceptually it does not seem hard.
1: Large areas of northern Virginia have been transformed from rural areas to bedroom communities for D.C.'s growing middle class. I think they are referring to newly created cities in those areas.
What's going on in Alaska? At a glance things have improved there in a way they haven't for Native dominated areas in the CONUS. Or am I just seeing an influx of resource workers in most of the Unorganized Borough driving up the averages, while Natives remain screwed? Kusilvak sticks out, for instance.
3: Thanks. Interesting in that AIUI normally one has suburbs seceding from cities, rather than suburbs from counties; and that NoVa is largely left rather than right.
The lower Mississippi plantation belt really pops out in everything.
Suburbs can't really secede from cities that I ever heard of here. And they secede from counties so much as form another layer of government that exists to provide the more intensive services a small city needs that a county isn't set up to provide. Every municipality, except where they have combined city-county structures, is part of both a city and a county.
s/b "And they don't secede from counties so much as form another layer of government
7/8 makes sense. But whence then the quote in 1? Have NoVa counties been subdivided?
What the heck happened in 2005? Obviously Katrina in Louisiana, but "Forces of war, nature, and legal intervention" skyrocket over almost the entire country (except the northeast), then goes back down to baseline the next year. There's no particular spike in Iraq War deaths that year. I'm not seeing anything about a heatwave that year, either.
3: It's a little weird since no new independent cities have been created since 1975.
There's a similar spike in 2001, so I wonder if this is just counting people who died in the attacks as dying in their home counties.
Improvement in is neonatal disorders is really striking. And why were those so much worse east of the Mississippi?
Subdivided in the reports on dead people. That is, we have a county department of health and they handle dead people reporting. Or the state does it all, I forget. Regardless, the report will say the county and municipality where the deceased resided. If there was no municipal government where the person resided, the data would be at the level of the county. That's not possible here (there are no unincorporated areas in this county), but in rural areas it is common.
On preview, I didn't know about 10.2. I don't know the details of northern Virginia. I'm just thinking of what likely happened based on my experience in other areas.
10: Word-search Katrina in the article, they have some theories on it.
12: Southern rural poverty, mostly afflicting African-Americans. The most prominent counties now are all in the Black Belt (or, if out west, have large Native American reservations).
12,15: Yes, actually just the South, really. But it's much worse for neonatal than for anything else.
There were issues with neonatal deaths being reported in Texas, so perhaps this is a similar problem. Or perhaps small babies are the canary in the coal mine as far as a collapsing healthcare system.
10: 2004-07 all seem to be well above average.
13: Whether or not rural areas can be unincorporated is a state thing; PA, NY, and I think most northeastern states have no unincorporated areas. On the other end, Alaska has a huge area that doesn't even have a county-equivalent.
14: Thanks, I knew someone would RTFArticle for me and clue me in. Interesting that that's how the model responds to localized spikes--I wonder how that affects less obvious cases?
16: If I had to guess, it's the causes most easily reduced (on a statistical level, at least) by good access to hospitals, although there are probably other ways that poverty and lack of education play into it. There are other causes that have similar distributions--check out diabetes (also common in Appalachia) and interpersonal violence.
I would maybe not pay so much attention to changes the big open areas out west unless they spread over several counties. If you have 50,000 people in a county and a death rate of 100/100,000 and you adjust for age, you have 50 people dying a year. Most of them are going to be very old, so it might not take many twenty-somethings dying to cause a big blip.
18: Hrm. True. And looking more closely, there's a single county in Texas, Polk County, that stands out almost every year. Looking into it, it contains the prison where Texas executes people. It really only picked up since 2000, so I guess that's all on Rick Perry and his successor.
20: One has exactly such multi-county waves in the West, 2004-07.
It's not just the west, though--it's also extending to rural counties of the south.
Unless this is picking up Iraq War deaths, it could be the model approximating from Polk County. As those other counties go back to baseline, note that Polk County is also decreasing (it's still colored dark cyan in most of them, but it goes from the 40s to the 10s over that period).
Definitely an area where cartograms would present a more informative picture! As it is this mostly tells the eye the story of various rural areas.
Assuming Westerners are overrepresented in the military, Us casualties in Iraq could drive much of the wave. I don't see how that cold account for Southern counties with dense populations though.
Virginia was bothering me. I looked and found this thing about "independent cities." Anyway, Virginia is different my blather based on normal states was just wrong.
I probably could have waited for somebody who lives there to say something, but where's the fun in that?
I thought you resented learning stuff.
Not as much as I resent not knowing everything.
(This is facsinating. Thanks lw!)
19.1. My recollection is that MD is an exception to everything being incorporated. For a long time, there were only a few incorporated cities in the DC suburbs, for example, such as Rockville, Tacoma Park, and Garrett Park (pop. 900).
County government was and is very strong there, which may have reduced the interest in incorporation. There are actually over 150 such cities and towns, but lots of territory isn't part of any of them. Big "town-like places" that look like they ought to be incorporated aren't: Columbia, Germantown and Bethesda, for example.
Just the opposite of MA, where every square inch is part of a city or town and counties are vestigial: names on a map that are responsible for registering deeds and running jails, but little else.
Just to follow up with 20, in 2012, the census bureau estimated that only 6 of our 56 counties had more than 50,000 people. 35 had fewer than 10,000 people. 11 had fewer than 2,000 people, and some of those were pretty big.
http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-united-states-lives-in-these-counties-2013-9
On the other end, Alaska has a huge area that doesn't even have a county-equivalent.
So the state/federal government is the only authority? Is there any private land in these places?
The population of Los Angeles County alone is bigger than that of 41 of the 50 states.
35 - Alaska has municipal governments, but nothing between the State and the municipality (ie, a county). Or that's my understanding, I'm not an Alaska expert but suspect one will show up soon. This is in part because there are too many isolated municipalities and too few people to have counties make sense and in part because Native Alaskans are organized in part by village, very differently than Native Americans in the lower 48. But yes there is private property.
I FEEL YOU, MASTER HICK. BUT BE WARNED, ON THAT ROAD LIES ONLY BITTERNESS.
To explain the Virginia thing: weirdly, you live in either a city or a county, not both, and counties can be either urban or rural or suburban or all three. Cities are pretty uniformly urban-ish.
There are some differences in state law about what cities can do and what counties can do; for instance, my county is home to Jefferson Davis Highway, much to our unhappiness. However, because we're a county, we would need the state legislature's permission (ha!) to change that road name. The neighboring city down the road has full jurisdiction over its road naming and can change its portion of that same highway without permission.
As you might expect, there were some racial politics in the middle of the 20th century about small suburban enclaves declaring themselves a "city" and seceding from the surrounding county.
39.3: Politics pointing which way? That is, were the counties more or less racist than the seceding cities?
California has cities, counties, and then one hybrid, the City and County of San Francisco, which is made up of smug jerks.
On the relevant timescales, MD is patterned like southern states, not northeastern.
I thought in the usual case in Alaska, boroughs are the county equivalents, and that there were municipalities within boroughs--e.g. Wasilla in the Mat-Su Borough. But then the Unorganized Borough is different, with only local governments as Halford said. But I should probably leave this to teo.
And yeah, independent cities are what make maps of Virginia poxy.
What's up with Kenedy County TX and transport injuries?
It's a basically uninhabited county with a major highway through it, ok, but there must be hundreds like that in the US. Dozens just in Texas.
44: Very sparsely inhabited: population 416 in 2010. There are One death per year gets you 240/100k. There are about 36 counties with population under 1000, and presumably not many of them have major highways going through them.
43 - That county has a total population of 416. A car crash that kills 5 people is enough to change the rates. Basically, from a social trends perspective, it's a giant who gives a fuck.
And more broadly that is why, especially given things like 36, I have a hard time with the super-charged-internet-driven-popularity of county level computerized maps. I mean sure they can reveal some things but they're often pretty terrible at revealing information about how most Americans live and are super popular mainly because they're shiny objects for our crow-like brains.
you live in either a city or a county, not both, and counties can be either urban or rural or suburban or all three
And to further complicate things, VA has incorporated towns, which are within counties and provide more local functions and therefore IMU more closely resemble cities in the majority of other states, whereas VA's independent cities consolidate city and county functions more like San Francisco, Philadelphia, etc.
MY FRIENDS WOULD LIKE A WORD, MR. HALFORD.
46: I propose we defragment the nation into 3,142 counties of equal population, just like the founders wanted.
Eh, fine. The county maps really spectacularly bring out the shittiness of Native areas and the South though. Kind of worth it for that.
Agreed, as well as revealing general urban/rural divides or localized events. It has issues, but it's by no means useless. It's also easier for the unfamiliar to parse than a properly weighted cartogram.
Also it's kind of cheering to see how many health measures show pretty steady progress.
50 - yes, agree though even there the quirk is largely one of ethnicity as much as geography. That's invious for the reservation counties in the West, but the counties you're seeing in the Mississippi Delta with spectacularly bad health results show up because they are counties with very heavy black populations. Aggregates by wealth/income/race would be way more revealing, albeit way more boring and less clickable.
43-46 -- When I was a kid we used to drive through there every summer. IIRC pretty much the whole county was a single ranch.
I was misinformed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ranch
Which tropical diseases are killing people on reservations in the Dakotas?
Kentucky and lung cancer is quite a thing.
The difference between the lung cancer map and the drug abuse map is interesting. The drug abuse is a clear Appalachian pattern with just as much in WV as eastern KY and plenty of OH and IN. The lung cancer really seems to be KY specific, with high death rates even in western KY and much less death in WV. Is this a state law thing?
57: Rabies? (Not tropical, but neglected.)
The neglected map change over time is interesting. One of the few measures that doesn't show clear progress, though the numbers are tiny.
SHINY OBJECTS ROCK!
25, 46: How finicky is the code to generate cartograms? If there's a straightforward-to-use python library, I should be able to generate the static maps. The 5-year data's pretty compact, looks well-organized so easy to read.
Similarly if the mouseover to switch images should be easy, though I don't know the library to do that offhand and pretty much anything for nice html post-2002 or so makes me crazy from cascading dependencies and finicky choices I do not care about.
64: Dunno about Python. There's a library to do it with R but it's broken.
n-grams show that the late-70s cat food commercials starring Morris caused a change in the English language.
In 1973, "Flammable" and "Inflammable" were antonyms.
Tilegrams are nice, but: " The county-level US tilegram we set out to produce is still a mammoth effort away. "
http://pitchinteractive.com/latest/tilegrams-more-human-maps/
So maybe that's why there's no cartogram...
I'm on a boat and can't comment much, but 42.2 is correct about Alaska.
They probably have a gold fringed flag, don't they.
Anyone with a looming deadline might consider instead spending a few moments contemplating the life of Mifflin Kenedy.
Would it have killed him to spell his name right?
I did some googling, and I think West Nile is at least part of it. I can recall everybody in Nebraska being worried about it also, but the counties that lit up in South Dakota have a level of poverty that you don't see at that scale in Nebraska.
I don't understand what they mean by "county-level" tilegrams. Some counties would have to be combined, some carved up. But I appreciate the effort.
74. Applying the diffusion process that generates cartograms and then discretizing boundaries into hexagonal tiles yields wierd shapes. A human rearranges the tiles but keeps area constant to get something like state boundaries and also something like a US national boundary. Tractable for 50 states, not for thousands of counties.
In principle there'd be a way for someone more energetic than me to code a way of generating first approximations to this approach automatically with simulated annealing and a suitable cost function. But I suspect that an automatic approach would still look kind of screwy-- in any case I'm not up to the more modest task of even grabbing the java cartogram making code and seeing what can be done for counties, because I'd like to get some veggies planted and have both useful work and dinking around that I will get to before that. Regrets.
Speaking of mortality, I took a shower after a long hike on Sunday and found a tick on my leg. It hadn't swelled up yet and after soaking it in soapy water I removed it by pinching it with my fingernails and pulling it straight out. It was still alive, for a few more seconds.
Two days later, no symptoms of lyme disease yet.
So, I just finished S2 of The Crown. How much do you hate it, Brits?
I've never seen it, but I'm reliably informed that the royal family follow it avidly.
76: Aren't you supposed to get antibiotics if it bit.
76. Some tick borne diseases transmit quickly, some more slowly. If the tick wasn't attached for 12-24 hours you likely won't get Lyme disease (which doesn't always develop the "characteristic" red ring around the bite). On the other hand, it takes less than 15 minutes to transmit Powassan fever, which has terrifying mortality. It isn't very widespread yet, but watch out.
79. Yes. In some states you can (sometimes) send in your tick and they will tell you what it is infected with, but it takes a week or so.
So if it's Powassan the lab can just alert the coroner directly.
Lyme Disease prophylaxis is not a tiny condom.
I probably should have saved the tick. I would have done more research on what to do if I hadn't been in the shower or if I had a waterproof computer.
Last time I had a tick bite, a doctor essentially ended up knifing it out. I got a scar, not great anesthetic, brief intense pain, and I don't think any antibiotics.
fa's doctor was either Dr. Benway or Tarzan.
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