So. Much. Data. *heavy breathing*

So it's been a while since I posted. Sorry about the delay I've just been overwhelmed with WHAT to post. Right now I've got a lot of irons in the fire but the big thing is I'm doing a Tableau presentation on Friday which I've essentially had more than 2 months to work on and I'm only presenting for an hour! I've got WAAAAAY too much stuff to fit into an hour presentation!

I'm going to show off:

• My work in Import.io using Bulk Data Extraction from set URLs
• Data Sets of Interest
• UK Salary Data
• Lexington City Salary Data
• Twitter Data
• Instagram Data

So it'll be a busy day just showing where to get all this stuff and what you can create with it! Hit me up on twitter @wjking0 if you have any comments/suggestions/etc.

Crosswalk Data - A Lesson in Finding Exactly What You're Looking For

I enjoy a nice Fall (or even early Winter) walk. I live in the beautiful and vibrant city of Lexington KY. It's a largely urban city so I spend a lot of time crossing crosswalks. Crosswalks have a numerical countdown... I love number problems!

Times obviously weren't a set number so either they're set randomly by whomever is setting them up or there is a pattern. I figured it had something to do with the account of traffic in an intersection (cars/hr or something equivalent). I started looking in the usual places for the stoplight/crosswalk light information I was looking for /r/datasets, data.gov, etc. It wasn't until I started glancing into city municipal data for various larger cities that I discovered that the math was already done for me!

T = d/1.065

T = Crosswalk time in seconds
d = Distance in meters

The 1.065 m/s (3.5 ft/s) comes from a study done in 1982 regarding mobility of pedestrians. Generally speaking the speed of the average pedestrians is around 1.22 m/s but a longer time is factored for walking speed to give time to elderly walkers and pedestrians with mobility disabilities (which accounts for about 15% of the population). So now every time you cross a street you can think to yourself how long the crosswalk (and thusly stoplight) SHOULD be and be able to roughly calculate if that's accurate!

Now given the dataset that I just got access to the other day (upcoming viz VERY soon, I promise) I'm now wondering if I could time it based on light changes to walk to work hitting every single crosswalk at the correct time based on the distance between lights, crosswalk distance, and light timing. It's moments like this that I think I'm steadily becoming this guy:

Like I said, new viz regarding stop light data is coming very soon... 

* Most of the municipal data for this post is pulled from this site: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/publications/sidewalk2/sidewalks208.cfm

Where (Not) To Eat In Lexington, KY

I got this data from the Lexington, KY Health Department and while I hoped to have this constantly update-able I don't know that is going to be the case. I had to do quite a bit of data-teasing before I could actually do some work (particularly with location data). Additionally I had to create a file that contained all the Health Code violations and definitions so I knew which were "Critical" violations and what each code means. So this may be a one-off data viz.

I wanted to look originally if zip-code (and thusly socio-economic status) of an area had anything to do with food quality but I quickly realized another trend. That "Marts" and grocery stores tended to fall towards the end of the spectrum. Also interestingly every "school" is listed as well... use the search function to search for schools or other clusters of dining places to see if you notice any trends and you can shoot me a message @wjking0!

Search or click on the map and drag to select multiple locations and scroll down for more info about your selection!

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