Tommy added a legend to the KML, and now we have it available for download right here. What’s best is that he spent some time and put county names, unemployment rates, and some more attribution into the info bubbles. This data set is powerful stuff, and we see that even though the unemployment rate is currently 7.9%, there are counties like Mackinac County in Northern Michigan that have an unemployment rate of 24.2%. Staggering numbers…
My former boss, Tommy Albo, imported centroids of unemployment data by county to Google Earth and quickly compiled this pretty amazing visualization. The numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and represent unemployment levels as of December, 2008. Download the original county data or a PDF map from Primary Data Source. This was all brought to our attention through The Society for Conservation GIS email list, and a post by Gina Clemmer at New Urban Research, Inc. Thanks to Tommy and Gina! Enough links? Okay, the goods are below. Notice the Southeast, Upper Midwest and the West Coast.
I just got an email from Google Earth Outreach about the release of Google Earth 5. As speculated over and over, and discussed here just over a year ago, it includes the new bathymetry layer, and it now has ocean depths. You can grab the update from the Google Earth website.
