Guantanamo vs. Habeas Corpus vs. Rendition vs. Waterboarding vs. Wiretapping

Still-vice-president Cheney is making some news as of late with his blunt defense of the excesses of the Bush administration. I faced off a few terms considering only US Googlers:



The prison camp in Guantanamo came out on top overall. The highest peaks however were noted for waterboarding. Wiretapping didn't register much. How were the state rankings?



The District of Columbia, the center of the federal government, came in first every time. Virginia where among others the CIA is headquartered made two appearances (Guantanamo and habeas corpus). The other DC neighbor, Maryland, was second for habeas corpus and wiretapping. Most surprising was the presence of South Dakota (rendition) and Utah (waterboarding).

United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, (Great) Britain in the US

I investigated a little bit further along the lines of my "United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian" posts 1 and 2. This time, I faced off the same five European countries but only among US Googlers:



France was no. 1, followed by Italy. It was however odd that the UK with whom Americans share a common language and are culturally and politically closely linked, came in dead last. As mentioned before, France's recurring summer peak was due to the Tour de France. Let's have a look at the state rankings for interest in the five countries, beginning with the UK:



Among this smaller volume of searches, DC, New York and Illinois stood out. Mississippi came last. How about France?



The top 3 consisted of DC, New York and California. South Dakota came in dead last. Just like with the UK, the political and trade ties probably pushed DC to the top. Louisiana, which you would expect to be interested in France, didn't make the top 10. Next, Germany:



Michigan led for this country, followed by Wisconsin and DC. Could this have something to do with a larger share of German-Americans in the first two states? Louisiana thought the least about Germany. Then came Spain:



New York led, New Jersey was a close second and third was Florida. The pattern seemed to correlate with the distribution of Hispanics in the US. Oklahoma ended up last. Finally, Italy:



For Italy, it was New York, Connecticut and then New Jersey. South Dakota didn't care much for the Mediterranean "boot." I was still puzzled about the low score for the UK though: maybe "the United Kingdom" was a tad too bureaucratic a term, not what people type into the Google search box? I tested this theory by comparing the constituent parts of the UK:



England blew the competition as well as the UK out of the water: more than 13 times higher Google-popularity than the UK. Northern Ireland barely registered. A caveat however was apparent when looking at the state rankings: the New England states made up the top 6, in other words, a lot of the hits may be for the New England region rather than England.


One more test: I faced off Britain, Great Britain (also often used terms) and the UK:



Britain was tops, Great Britain was last. The term Great Britain—from which the automobile country code "GB" is derived—covers England, Wales and Scotland. The full name of the UK is actually the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Why is Britain "great"? Originally, "greater" distinguished it from "lesser" Britain, i.e., Brittany in France. Remember William the Conqueror and the French connections? Later, it was used to cement the union of England and Scotland. Britain in its proper use is then the geographical entity of the island containing Scotland, Wales and England. Of course, common usage conflates all this ;-)

Broadband penetration vs. Obama vote

I was reading how the Obama campaign talked about the "net roots." How about we plot internet broadband penetration vs. Obama's percentage of the vote and well by state:



I added a perfect fit line that shows where the states would be if the two measures were perfectly correlated. The red linear trend line showed what the states actually turned to cluster around: it was not parallel, i.e., only a so-so correlation. I know that I probably should have used normalized numbers for both measures but I ran out of time. Still, I think this was very intriguing: it did seem to correlate not too badly. I identified the outliers on the Democratic side: DC (always heavily Democratic), Vermont (Socialist senator!) and Hawaii (Obama's childhood home state); on the Republican side: Alaska (Palin's home state), Utah (heavily Mormon) and Wyoming (Cheney's home state). These were expected. Look then for the states that displayed the best correlation between broadband penetration and Obama vote (from left to right): West Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Montana, Missouri—still not officially settled!—, North Carolina, Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia, Oregon and New Jersey. They were a mixture of "toss-up" states (MO, NC, OH, VA) and "blue" (MN, OR, NJ) or "red" states (WV, MS, SC, MT). Note that the blue states were at the high end of the scale (to the right), the red ones at the bottom (to the left) and the toss-ups in the centre. Delaware (Biden's home state), Illinois (Obama's other home state) and Arizona (McCain's home state) ended up on their partisan side but not in an outspoken way.

I tried a second approach using the Obama minus McCain percentage of the vote:



The perfect fit line ran parallel to the blue trend line: a good correlation this time around. Overall, the distribution of the states was very similar to the previous graph. Conclusion: the higher the broadband penetration, the higher the Democratic vote seemed to be. I guess that does confirm some of the analyses of the election I read. Nevertheless, I have to caution to read too much in these graphs, the more since my grasp of this type of statistics is a bit shaky...

By the way, a "classic" face-off of broadband vs. Obama yielded this interesting result:



Broadband has been popular with Googlers for a long time. Obama was more a recent phenomenon that ended up overtaking broadband in aggregate.

Update 11-14-08: My statistical skills were indeed lacking. Look at the comments for corrections and the like.

NSF vs. NEA vs. USAID vs. NEH vs. IMLS

I faced off five grant-making US government agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).



The NSF was clearly in the lead, followed by the NEA and USAID. IMLS was at the bottom of Google-popularity. However, which one was decreasing or increasing its search volume? That was hard to see. I downloaded the data and plugged them into MS Excel. I made a graph of the cumulative weekly Google searches:



The lines were pretty smooth, in other words, none of the agencies saw extreme differences in search volume from one week to another. How about a graph showing the trend lines of the change percentage of the data of weekly Google searches?



Now I was getting somewhere: obviously, the IMLS experienced the highest increase on average, then the NSF and USAID. The other two showed a decline on average, with a small decline for the NEH and a larger one for the NEA. Getting back to Google Insights for Search, I had a look at how the searches were spread geographically. First, the NSF:



The top 3 states were New Mexico, District of Columbia and Maryland. Nevadans stood out for searching for the NSF the least. Next, the NEA:



The leader was here Arkansas! Not the state I would have most linked with the arts if you'd asked me. There must be an explanation for this: any suggestions? No. 2 was Alaska—also unexpected—followed by Vermont. Let's move on to USAID.



DC led big time as was expected, followed by Maryland and Virginia which also have a high concentration of federal government people concerned with international issues. North and South Dakota, Wyoming and West Virginia had no searches for USAID at all. How did the NEH fare?



DC, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were the most interested. The "zero-searchers" of USAID were joined by Nevada, Idaho and Montana. Finally, how did the distribution pattern of the IMLS look?



Strangely enough, Idaho was the clear leader! It was followed at some distance by DC and Maryland.