Chris writes:
institutionalization in the united states, per 100,000 adults
expenditures on health care as a percentage of GDP; from here. Data is from 2005 or latest available year.
timeline of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai
casino addiction, by the Daily Herald
violent crime in the us, 1978 - 1998, by Steve Ford
from the World Wildlife Federation
What Charles Booth did for London (see previous post), the Justice Mapping Center does for various American cities, regions and states. Except with a much better methodology. And better technology. And more completely.
Our friend Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:
Charles Booth's groundbreaking "Poverty Maps" of London from 1886 to 1903 used survey data to visually represent the quality of life for Londoners across a city that was characterized by enormous economic disparity. The LSE maintains an archive of the maps, zoomable and overlaid with the contemporary London map. The maps are colored from black ("Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.") to yellow ("Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.")
Brick Lane is a bit different today - on the map it's black to represent the highest rates of crime, poverty and mortality. A commenter on the BoingBoing thread notes that essays on that area of East London are available online, and also that the maps themselves are on display at Bishopsgate Library.
Via mongrelmedia.com:
"MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.
The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.
Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it."
