A Trucker's Odyssey

Bloomberg Business reporter Jennifer Oldham accompanied Tracy Livingston, a long-haul trucker on a six day journey involving two round trips between Michigan and Tennessee. The article provides a good, empathetic picture of the trucking life. They did an excellent job of mapping the journey.

You can click above for better resolution. Here is a detailed section.

The route is color coded by day. Icons are used to represent stops for gas, food, caffeine (a necessity when working 14 hour days) and various other needed diversions. These icons use the same colors for each day and add some personality to the map.

What's Your State?

A recent study of America's mood by state, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is featured in Time Magazine. There is a test you can take to see what state matches your personality. With all the discussion about introverted, neurotic people from the northeast, I figured I fit in perfectly but much to my surprise that wasn't the case.

Oregon????? I must have answered some of the questions more wishfully than truthfully. The regional patterns here are pretty clear and the article has interesting explanations for some of them. The west coast is clearly a separate region but I don't usually think of Arizona or New Mexico as part of that region and certainly not North Carolina. Texas is another odd one but they've seen lots of in-migration and immigration so maybe that state is more complex than the cliches suggest. Plus, according to another Time article and magazine cover, they are our future. Nice cover art!

By the way, if you take the test and enter the default value (neither agree nor disagree) for each question, you end up with Texas. Have fun taking the test. You too may end up in an unlikely place.

There's a Map of the Week for That

OK - I screwed up this post a bit. I will leave the original post intact but see the correction section at the end.

Verizon has blitzed the TV and print media with their clever "There's a map for that" advertisements. Given the ease of manipulating this type of map, I'm surprised that this ad has gone virtually unchallenged so far. Does Verizon's map color in any area of reception regardless of how spotty? Are the map projections the same? Does the red vs blue scheme imply some kind of secret Republican bias on the part of Verizon?
I wasted way too much time on a somewhat extensive web search and found nothing out there that challenges this ad. Here is a screenshot from the ad.


Here's a look at AT&T's "coverage viewer" map - it tells a slightly different story.


Both carriers, Verizon and AT&T have interactive coverage maps. You can zoom down to street level to see your local coverage. However, if you live in any urbanized area you're likely to see nothing but a sea of color. Both of these pages have very similar disclaimers. Here's part of AT&T's.
"Map may include areas served by unaffiliated carriers, and may depict their licensed area rather than an approximation of their coverage. Actual coverage area may differ substantially from map graphics, and coverage may be affected by such things as terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors. AT&T does not guarantee coverage"
Sounds like lots of gray areas that can go either way depending on whose map you're making.

The obvious lesson in all of this-don't believe everything you see in advertisements-or maps.

Or on this blog (See below)!!!!!





CORRECTION:
So, as anonymous commenter pointed out, the AT&T map I show above from their website is a "Voice & Data" map, not 3G. As are both of the coverage viewers that I linked to above. You can get a 3G map from AT&T but it's very tricky-if you really want it look for instructions in the comments. The map you will find is actually pretty similar to the map shown in the ad.

What's the difference? Is it just speed or are there things you can't do with "Voice & Data?" I don't know enough about this stuff to speculate.

So if I've unfairly portrayed Verizon as a bunch of liars, sorry about that. However, I am still very skeptical about their own coverage map and the entire premise of the ad. As the Verizon disclaimer says:

"This does not show exact coverage. Wireless service is subject to network and transmission limitations, particularly near boundaries and in remote areas"

If you want maps that are better than the blurry ones in the ads, see the Verizon 3G page.

Map of the Week - Subwayman

I'm not nearly New Yorky enough to read the New Yorker but John G. alerted me to the current issue's (June 30, 2008) cover. It's "Subway Man" by Roz Chast. Thank you John.

Map of the Week-Mapping Web Trends

Information Architects Japan produces this map of web trends. In their own words:

"The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map. Different train lines correspond to different web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on."


I've spent a fair amount of time looking over this subway map of Tokyo for the similarities and they're not obvious. However, there is a detailed description of the various lines and the how changes in web traffic affect the placement of sites.
Here's a description (and map) of google's recent promotion to Tokyo's central station.

"In terms of traffic, Tokyo station is the center of Tokyo. That’s why Google (which is slowly becoming a metaphor of the Internet itself) has moved from Shinjuku to Tokyo Station. Google continues to push new modules into the main lines in an attempt to occupy the center circle."
Hey look! Blogger's on there! Maybe Map of the Week will earn its own station someday!