Social Explorer (And that old addage that 'nothing is free' still holds true)

I played around on this website for a good half hour just looking at how population has changed in the last 100 years. I kept changing the years to see where people were migrating too and things like that. Unfortunately, my interest wained shortly after I stopped playing with the population, because in the free version, that is the only parameter that can be looked at. Honestly, I would have expected a few more options available to those who do not wish to pay for a subscription. I probably would have complained about the price of the subscription, but it is strangely not publicized on their website.

I found the demographic information for New York City from 1940 to 2000. I thought it would be interesting to look at the black population centered around the Bronx. However, this brought me to my next problem. The plague of reduced features makes it virtually impossible to export maps as images, without some fancy Paint work that I would rather not do. Instead, I created links!

Bronx African American Population

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

As you can see from the maps above, there were very few African Americans in the Bronx in 1940. By 2000, there are two distinct areas of heighted population to the northeast and southwest.

After thinking for a bit about population mapping and criminal justice, it would make an interesting project to map how population increases affect crime rates with respect to both the raw population numbers as well as demographic data.

Overall, I think the website is a valuable source of information, especially when it can be exported to other programs. The map utility that they use to access their data is cumbersome and inefficient though. The controls are unresponsive and the map window is so short and wide that it is difficult to place the map in a position that provides any relevant information. Combine that with the wealth of inaccessable features on the free version and it is nearly impossible to do anything more meaningful than playing around.

Mapping Music That Sounds Good

I found this really interesting theory to map music while searching on Google. Tymoczko, a composer taking up residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, found a way to map music that sounds pleasing to the human brain. The actual element of music that makes it enjoyable has remained a mystery, despite resources such as sheet music. Tymoczko used non-Euclidian geometry to create an object called an orbifold. Shown in the picture below, this complex mathematical figure allows Tymoczko to map chords that sound pleasing to the human ear. Chords that sound good are mapped inside the orbifold, while those that do not are placed farther away.

Tymoczko hopes that his invention will be used to help schoolchildren better understand music. He also envisions developing computer programs that can analyze and compose music that sounds good, as well as creating instruments which make it easier to play music that sounds good. Heres an example of E-minor mapped using this technique:

I feel this is a pretty significant breakthrough. Since the creation of music, no one has known exactly why certain notes and chords are appealing while others are annoying and painful. It will be interesting to see how this discovery is going to be used, whether to create music that is tailored to use chords that all sound good or to even create new instruments as Tymoczko suggests.

Source: http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/01/mapping-music.html