“Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake… I… drink… your… milkshake! I drink it up!”
-There Will Be Blood

However, when it comes to home heating, that oil goes through a straw acroooooooss the country, and it’s the Northeast that drinks the oil:


So to your list of Northeastern stereotypes, you can add something new: Northeasterners use oil or kerosene to heat their homes more than anywhere else in the country.

Here are the top ten oil producers (by employment) and consumers (by household) in the United States:

This month the creative assets mapping team took our project to local stakeholders here in Philadelphia for feedback and discussion. As we begin to coalesce around the tool’s data, design, and features, we decided it was critical to get input early on from the tool’s community of potential users.

Our conversations were dynamic, with ideas ranging from generating Philly neighborhood arts and culture profiles to using the tool to locate new creative firms or target potential cultural audiences. In addition to use cases, we identified many of the datasets that users want to have at their fingertips, and even located sources for much of this information. We are particularly excited about the willingness of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists from the City to make data available to us to share with the public through our creative assets mapping platform.

Altogether we hosted four user-group sessions on November 3rd and 4th, each centered around a distinct type of user: artistic and creative programming, tourism and marketing opportunities through cultural assets, real-estate and economic development applications, and cultural funders and capacity building. Each of the sessions was unique in its focus, but many common themes and ideas permeated all the sessions including: using the tool to facilitate relationship building and data sharing; using it to evaluate the impact of policies and programs over time; and using the tool to help make better decisions either through advocacy or in investment decisions.

Most of all, we are thrilled at the level of anticipation that greeted our presentation of the data we have already and the analytical opportunities afforded by interactive online mapping. As we move now into a more intensive development phase of the tool, we will continue to seek input from these voices as well as Philadelphia’s broader cultural and creative community.

You can nominate PolicyMap at : http://is.gd/6w80va

Please nominate PolicyMap everyday and ask all your social networks to do the same. Nominations close Dec 13th.

The Reinvestment Fund documents the effects of creative activity and cultural engagement in Philadelphia.

The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), in collaboration with the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, continues to examine the ways creative activity and cultural engagement play a role in neighborhood economic development and what we call the Architecture of Community.

“Given their interrelated webs of universities, cultural institutions, design firms and culturally diverse population, all of which help attract creative workers and spur creative content, cities – like Philadelphia – are naturally positioned to take advantage of this sector. Yet, if we develop a more comprehensive view of how creative activity, particularly community-based arts and culture, interacts within cities, we can stimulate even more integrated and effective action in the development of distressed urban places.”

Creativity and Neighborhood Development, Strategies for Community Development, Jeremy Nowak

With generous funding from ArtPlace and the National Endowment for the Arts, this partnership will further its research and produce a web tool with access to a robust, spatial database that can inform planning, marketing, policy development and public investment strategies in Philadelphia.

Read the rest of the Creative Assets Maps release and see an interactive map on the ArtPlace website here.

We’ve updated the negative color ramp on our maps to more lively and distinguishable shades of orange. Maps with negative numbers now look distinctly autumnal, which is perhaps appropriate, displaying the foliage of falling values. With this new aesthetically pleasing and more usable map, we’ve found that we can remain optimistic while looking at data that happens to be numerically negative.

Please take a moment to register and VOTE for The Reinvestment Fund’s entry to the OpenDataPhilly contest. We have submitted two datasets and both are unique in helping to understand neighborhoods in Philadelphia, but please vote for the Residential Unsafe Building Citations.

You’ll need to register but we hope you take a moment and support some of the great work done at The Reinvestment Fund. You can cast one vote a week, so please come back and continue your support.

OpenDataRace is a contest to uncover Philadelphia-related data sets that are not yet available to the public. Non-profit organizations across the city have nominated data that would help them accomplish their missions and improve our region.

The map is separated between moderate and high risk flood zones. Moderate flood zones (in yellow) are at risk of a 500-year flood, meaning that, probabilistically, there is likely to be a flood once in 500 years. High risk flood zones (red) are at risk of a 100-year flood.

Remember, though, that these are just probabilities. Here in Philadelphia, we’ve now had two 100-year floods in two weeks.

You can search for a congressperson’s or senator’s district from the Set Location bar:

Or see them listed in any of the reports:

Or see their districts with boundaries from the Map Options menu:

And you can be rest assured that you’re seeing the most current names.

In the last term alone, there have been six changes in membership to the US House and Senate, and all but one were connected to some sort of sex scandal. Senator John Ensign (Nevada), and Representatives Christopher Lee (New York’s 26th district), Anthony Weiner (New York’s 9th), and David Wu (Oregon’s 1st) all resigned due to some sort of monkey business, and once Representative Dean Heller left the House to join the Senate to take Ensign’s seat. Only Jane Harman, from California’s 36th, left for an innocuous reason, to become the head of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Lee’s seat and Harman’s seat were filled by Kathy Hochul and Janice Hahn, respectively, in special elections.

So if you want to know who’s representing you in Washington, or whether they’re still representing you in Washington, then check out PolicyMap for the latest info.

For students (or anyone, really) interested in basic information about data collected by the Census, check out this posting from National Geographic. Learn how and why the Census Bureau collects the information that it does.

Did you know that the U.S. Census counts every resident in the United States and is required by the United States Constitution to take place every 10 years. The 2010 census found that there are 308,745,538 people in the U.S.

In order to count and collect information about all those residents, the Census Bureau delivers a 10-question form to every household. This form includes questions about sex, age, race, household relationships, and property ownership. These sets of data are defined as demographic data.

Read more about the US Census here: National Geographic – The US Census