This week’s Data Driven Digest is all about work. We have three great work-related data visualizations: One is a wild-looking map, part of an infographic showing where software developers work and earn the most. Another, a combined map and bar chart, shows how many hours people toil in the ten U.S. cities with the longest workweeks. The third is an interactive website showing the diverse safety records of a major workplace: more than 2,500 U.S. hospitals, employing tens of thousands of healthcare professionals. And because we all need some fun to go with our work, a bonus item applies Big Data concepts to 50 years of pop music.
State of Developers: Want to know where you, as a developer, are most likely to find work and earn the best salary? Check out the map above. Column Five collaborated with Lucidworks to redraw the map of the United States according to the number of developers in each state. This map is part of a larger infographic (click through for the whole thing) that also contains average salaries by state and region and the percentage of the overall employed population that are developers. All data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On the Job: You can’t discuss work without talking about time. In Forbes, Niall McCarthy has charted the ten cities in the U.S. with the longest workweeks – factoring in both hours on the job and time spent commuting. New York City topped the list, but workers in the Big Apple don’t put in the longest hours at the desk; San Franciscans claim that crown. The concept of this graphic is good, but we wish the chart was interactive and the data source (or sources) were linked. Do our readers have time to improve on this visualization?
Safety in Numbers: If you’re a healthcare professional, do you work in a Grade A hospital? And if you’re a patient, is the hospital where you get treatment as safe as it can be? The Leapfrog Group has created Hospital Safety Score, an interactive website providing safety scores for 2,523 U.S. hospitals. Searchable by city and state, ZIP Code, or name, the site gives each hospital a letter grade, and lets you drill down to see performance in more than two dozen specific safety measures. Thanks to @MichaelSinger for delivering this baby to the Data Driven Digest.
Song of Data (bonus item): What can Big Data tell us about pop music? Quite a bit, say Matthias Mauch, Robert M. MacCallum, Mark Levy, and Armand M. Leroi. Writing in Royal Society Open Science, the researchers – you might call them the Fab Four of Data Science – used data mining techniques to analyze about 17,000 songs that appeared in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Their article, loaded with charts and detailed data analysis, identifies three stylistic revolutions in pop music – the biggest in 1991, with the rise of rap and related genres – and “points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”
Like what you see? Every Friday we share great data visualization and embedded analytics. If you have a favorite or trending example, tell us: Submit ideas to blogactuate@actuate.com or add a comment below. Subscribe (at left) and we’ll email you when new entries are posted.
Recent Data Driven Digests:
May 1: Star Wars Day, GPS constellations, personal data costs
April 24: Global cravings, California roadkill, Bay Area costs, tech skills
April 17: Rage in the Iliad, comparing country sizes, 25,000 songs