The recent foreclosure crisis has resulted in significant economic and social strain throughout the United States. One place hit very hard during the recession is Florida. Florida experienced high levels of foreclosures due to rapid home construction and predatory lending that occurred during the 2002-2005 run up to the recession. In this post I highlight a free source of foreclosure data produced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development through conjunction with the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Federal Reserve. The dataset provided by HUD allows you to download data down to the census tract level on home foreclosures …

In a recent article in the L.A. Times it was reported that the U.S. has decreased oil imports and has increased oil production. This article inspired me to search for data on oil production and consumption by country. Before we can create a map with this type of data we need a file that we can use to join data to. If you have seen previous posts you will see that we have used a basemap from Geocommons . I will be using this baseman again for this post. Download the file and then save it as World.shp …

I recently read an article on the Guardian about the changing distribution of carbon dioxide production by country. Carbon dioxide is among the most closely watched greenhouse gases that potentially leads to global warming. According to the Guardian article China has increased its production of CO2 by about 170% since 1984, which is more than the U.S. and Canada combined. Other important changes mentioned in the article are that England has dropped in its production and that India has moved above Russia to the third rank. The U.S. is second in CO2 production behind China. I …

A colleague pointed me to an interesting website for the International Telecommunications Union. The ITU is an organization that collects and disseminates telecommunications data. Their website provides information on various topics and also includes access to graphics and free data. On the right side of their main page there is a list of datasets about communication systems by country for years 2000-2010. This is a very nice set of data because the data are time-series, and because the data appear to have few missing values. For this post I downloaded the dataset "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet". After the …

For this post I found data on Statistics Canada, which is a governmental website that provides access to data on various topics within Canada. The website includes spatial data for creating maps and variable data for creating tables. To start you need to get a spatial file. I decided to get data for Provincial regions within Canada. To download the Provincial Regions shapefile to the Provincial Region Page and click on the link "ger_000b11a…." After you download the shapefile import it into Cartographica by choosing File > Import Vector Data. To download basic population data on Canadian provinces and territories go …