Mapping China’s 2008 Earthquake

The China Data Center at the University of Michigan is a rich resource for all kinds of information about China, particularly social and demographic data.  They also promote mapping as a research tool.  They recently posted some interesting maps related to the recent earthquake and China and the populations that were most affected by this disaster.  These slides are missing their narrative context, but some of the figures are nonetheless compelling.

Death Penalty Support in the U.S.

Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, posted a very interesting pair of line graphs on his blog Political Arithmetik showing the change in Americans’ opinions about the death penalty over time.  The point of his post was to show how changes in survey question wording can affect respondents’ answers, as well as the conclusions you draw from the data.  The blog has a lot of other informative presentations of polling data.  Aside from the fact that I find the content interesting, I also like this blog because it highlights important data resources (such as the Roper Center’s iPoll used to create the death penalty graphs) and nicely illustrates the utility of the statistical software  R, which is a powerful and free package.  It’s a nice alternative for those who cannot afford SAS or Stata.

I should also mention that I have taken Dr. Franklin’s ICPSR summer course on Maximum Likelihood estimation twice and found it incredibly useful.