A Field Guide to the Canis Notitia

Are you a data hound? This is not something you can easily fake. You are or you ain’t. And with just one simple question, I can tell if you are. Don’t you just love the smell of fresh data in the morning?  If you have a bewildered look on your face or find the...

Changing Income Patterns in Urban Areas

In the pre-automobile era, the pattern in most cities in the western world was quite similar – the wealthier you were, the closer to downtown you lived. In the twentieth century, the automobile made it possible for wealthy families to move far away from downtown and...

The Dog Days of Summer

We’ve all heard the phrase “the dog days of summer”. But where did this phrase come from? We use the phrase to refer to those hot and humid days of mid-summer, but it originates from ancient Greek culture. It was related to the rising of the star system Sirius, which...

The Purpose of Analytics

Many years ago, the company I worked for produced a business/daytime population report for radius studies. We did not have a complete business list but rather used the County Business Patterns which provides unedited (dirty) data at the ZIP code level only (not...

Picking the Pickles off Your Burger

Many years ago, a major advertising battle between McDonalds and Burger King was started when Burger King promoted the slogan “Have it your way” in the jingle that included the line “special orders don’t upset us”. If that jingle is now playing in your head in an...