The Maps of the Week

A new map from the New York Times uses data from the Census Bureau to show the percentages of people living below the poverty line in each census tract in the USA. The Mapping Poverty in America visualization uses the Google Maps API to provide poverty percentage rates and the numbers living in poverty in each USA census tract.

You can zoom in on the map to view the poverty levels at any location or you can use the links under the map to quickly zoom to a number of the larger US cities.



Thanks to ProPublica we now have a Google Map that allows you to find nearby emergency rooms and find out which has the shortest average waiting time. The ER Wait Watcher lets you search for any address in the United States and visualize all nearby emergency rooms. Not only does it show you all your nearby emergency rooms but it displays the average waiting times and tells you how long it will take to get there from your current location.

 
The Mozilla Location Service provides geolocation data based on cell tower and WiFi access point information. Mobile phones with a weak GPS signal and laptops without GPS hardware can use the service to quickly identify an approximate location.

You can see where the service is available on the new Mozilla Location Service Coverage Map. The map was created with MapBox and uses a dark variation of Mozilla’s custom maps, using Mozilla's typography for the map labels. A pretty neat feature of the map is how the labels are layered on top of the blue data points so that users can still easily navigate the map.