Here’s a look at just how much money just $1 trillion actually is, courtesy of the venture capital firm KPCB. The firm released its version of the country’s financial statement, called USA Inc., back in February.

Related:

• DataWatch: Putting those trillions, billions and millions into context

–Paul

Here’s Oklahoma (click for larger version):

For a PDF of the same map, click here.

You can see other states here.

We’re in the home stretch of redistricting in the state House and Senate. I had a story today about the major changes to Senate District 43 that straddles Oklahoma and Cleveland counties.

With the help of Web Editor Nick Tankersley, I came up with a series of sliding redistricting maps on NewsOK that include party voter registration.

(Click on the image to go to the page)

In these maps, purple precincts are competitive. Light blue leans Democratic and dark blue is heavily Democratic. Light red leans Republican, while dark red is heavily Republican. I computed these categories by comparing the percentage-point difference in Republican voter registration to Democratic voter registration in each precinct.

(Hat tip to Matt Stiles down at the Texas Tribune, where I got the idea to use the image sliders.)

–Paul

Basically, the tree map compares the whole amounts appropriated by agency from what it received in FY 2009 and what is proposed under the agreement for FY 2012. The intensity of orange shading shows an increase, while the intensity of blue shading shows a decrease. The size of each rectangle is proportional to its share of the overall budget appropriation.

For a larger version of the interactive, go here. (One note: You must enable Java on your browser.)

You can click on each rectangle to get a summary of each year’s amount and percent change. As you can see, pretty much every agency has suffered cuts over the last few years, with the exception of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, Commissioners of the Land Office and the state Election Board.

Thanks to the Oklahoma Policy Institute for help in compiling the numbers. You can view a PDF of their spreadsheet here.

–Paul

I’m still checking the data out, but in the meantime, below is a quick map I put up on GeoCommons. If you want to download the actual data, you can follow this link to the file.

To use it, you’ll need to unzip it and have access to a GIS program such as ArcGIS or QGIS. Or you can set up a free account at GeoCommons. They have some good instructions here. To make this kind of map more useful, you’ll need to add some information to it, such as demographic information or voter registration information. (I’m working on adding some of that data in GeoCommons, but can’t promise it will be up very quickly.)

Meanwhile, redistricting over in the Senate has been a little more contentious. But here’s hoping they follow the House’s lead on transparency and release the data behind the plan they’re working on.

Click for map

–Paul

I’m still adding annotations to this, but if you have anything to add, leave a comment below.

–Paul

From Sunday’s paper:

BY PAUL MONIES

Database Editor

pmonies(at)opubco.com

Published: May 1, 2011

Minority children are now the majority among children in 11 Oklahoma counties, including Oklahoma County, the state’s largest county.

That’s a big change from a decade ago, when just four** Oklahoma counties had “majority-minority” child populations.

Hispanic children and children of two or more races accounted for most of the state’s under-18 population growth in the last decade, according to an analysis of census data by The Oklahoman.

Also, the racial gap has widened between children and adults, another indication of a demographic shift that could change the face of Oklahoma. In almost half of the state’s counties, the gap between the share of white adults and white children exceeds the statewide average of 17 percentage points.

William Frey, a demographer at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, calls the differences between child and adult populations a “racial generation gap.” Oklahoma ranked sixth in the United States for the largest racial generation gap. Arizona was first.

“Change in the nation’s child population over the 2000s show the sharp distinction between the country’s aging white population and its growing, youthful new minority populations,” Frey said in a recent report. “These gaps could signal emerging cultural and political divisions across generations.”

Overall, 44 percent of Oklahoma’s children were minorities in 2010. That compared to 27 percent of adults who identified themselves as minorities. In 2000, minority children made up 35 percent of the child population. Almost 23 percent of adults were minorities.

For the analysis, minorities were anyone not identifying themselves or people in their household on census forms as white. Hispanics can be of any race, according to U.S. Census Bureau definitions.

Some of the demographic changes could be attributed to how people report race and ethnicity, said Patricia Bell, a sociology professor at Oklahoma State University.

“Some of that is not necessarily population growth or change, it’s re-identification where people identify themselves differently,” Bell said. “Sometimes when you have a couple who are of different races, they leave the race of a child blank on the form and the Census Bureau makes the assignment.”

Other changes could come from migration or differences in birthrates in rural or poverty-stricken areas, Bell said. Some white and black college graduates with children have left the state for job opportunities in the last decade. Also, the Hispanic growth in Oklahoma has been rapid, but the share of Hispanics in the state remains lower than neighbors such as Kansas and Texas, she said.

“It can be a combination of migratory patterns for women and children as well as birthrate,” Bell said. “People who have a multiracial background are more likely than before to identify themselves in some category that they didn’t use before.”

Changing child demographics

In the last decade, the number of children in Oklahoma increased by 4 percent to almost 930,000. By contrast, the adult population grew 10 percent to 2.82 million.

Oklahoma was among 27 states that had increases in their child populations.

Among children in Oklahoma, the growth was uneven across the state. The child population grew in 36 counties and fell in 41 counties.

The child populations in Canadian, McClain, Marshall, Logan and Wagoner counties all grew by more than 20 percent. It fell by more than 20 percent in Tillman, Grant and Cimarron counties.

Since 2000, the number of Hispanic children (of any race) grew by more than 62,000, or 89 percent.

At the same time, the number of children of two or more races grew by almost 27,000, or 49 percent, and the number of Asian children increased by 4,400, or 41 percent.

The number of American Indian children grew by more than 6,300, or 7 percent.

To contrast that, the state’s population of white children fell by nearly 57,000, or 10 percent, during the last decade. The number of black children fell by more than 6,700, or 8 percent.

In his report, Frey said similar shifts are happening across the country.

“Slower growth among whites owes in part to their lower fertility rate — about 1.9 births per white woman, compared with 3.0 births per Hispanic woman — as well as a relatively low contribution to population growth from immigration,” he wrote.

Child advocates said the demographic shifts among children have policy implications in Oklahoma.

“If we want a progressive, educated and healthy workforce, we have to look at the demographics within our state and assure that we have the needs to move forward to where we want Oklahoma to be,” said Linda Terrell, executive director of the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy.

Terrell said one of the biggest needs is educational support for bilingual programs. She cited a recent case of a woman in Cleveland County whose daughter had been treated for chronic earaches. Once a translator became involved, it turned out the woman wasn’t following medicine instructions.

“Once we got that language barrier taken care of, the baby was better,” Terrell said. “That’s just one kind of extra supports we need to make sure our children are cared for properly.”

–Paul

**The four counties in 2000: Adair, Cherokee, Harmon and Muskogee.

The Census also released some new information on where the population center of the United States is now. That’s the point where if the country were a flat sheet of paper, it would balance according to population. (That also assumes each person is the same weight.) Here’s their map of that new point, near Plato in southern Missouri, and how the population center has shifted over time.

The agency also released similar information for all the states. Oklahoma’s population center for 2010 is just outside the town of Sparks in Lincoln County.

I created a map using GeoCommons for all the state centers of population. You can view it by clicking on the image below or going here.

–Paul

In case you missed it, you should check out our stories and interactive map that launched over the weekend.

The Oklahoman staff writer Bob Doucette and NewsOK’s Nick Tankersley, along with several other reporters and editors, put together some statistics on Oklahoma City homicides from the last four years.

• Oklahoma City Homicide Map
• Minorities, men make up most Oklahoma City homicides
• Mother seeks justice for slain son

As well as a look back at recent homicides, the map and data will be updated by our Breaking News reporters in 2011 and beyond.

For those interested in the technical side of things, Nick built the homicide map using Django, an open-source application that was developed to help newsrooms put interactive web pages, databases and maps together quickly. This isn’t the first time we’ve used Django for a newsroom application. Our “story walls” from the State Fair and OU and OSU games also were built using Django. Digital Managing Editor Alan Herzberger has more on the Story Walls here.

We’ve also used Django internally to enter election results and to keep track of candidate biographies for the 2010 elections. Nick created a public search for those candidates on our Politics page in the fall.

–Paul

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s important in each release:

American Community Survey 5-year estimates

These are estimates of all types of demographic and sociological information for every part of the country, from states all the way down to the smallest census-level geography called a block group. The American Community Survey is sent to 3 million households each year. From those surveys, the Census Bureau can perform estimates in several categories.

• To look up your community in the latest ACS estimates, check out the American Factfinder tool.

This latest 5-year ACS release covers 2005 to 2009. The Census Bureau has been releasing similar information, in either 1-year estimates or 3-year estimates, for larger levels of population since 2007. For example, 1-year ACS estimates cover places with more than 65,000 people. The 3-year estimates cover places with more than 20,000 people.

Since this is a survey, and not an actual count like the decennial census, these data points come with margins of error, much like you’d see margins of error in an election poll. The Census Bureau has a lot of technical documentation on how it figures the estimates, but what you need to know is that the smaller the population area, the higher the margin of error.

For example, the margin of error for the percentage of high school graduates in Wellston, Okla., is plus/minus 10 percentage points. For Oklahoma City, the same category has a margin of error of plus/minus 0.5 percentage points. That’s because Wellston has a population of about 1,000 people, and Oklahoma City has about 546,000 people. Fewer ACS surveys went to Wellston residents than they did to residents in Oklahoma City, but the Census also takes confidentiality into account.

Here’s how the Census Bureau describes it:

To maintain confidentiality, the Census Bureau applies statistical procedures that introduce some uncertainty into data for geographic areas with small population groups.

Despite these limitations at really small places or units of geography, the ACS data is still useful to policymakers, academics and the public. The real benefit from having this ACS data will come in the next few years, when we have a baseline against which we can compare new data releases.

The New York Times released a slick-looking interactive map showing some of the latest ACS estimates: Click for an interactive version

The newspaper, with the help of Social Explorer, plotted various demographic estimates for each Census tract in the country. They used what’s called a dot-distribution map, which spaced out the dots randomly within the area of that particular tract. While it’s visually compelling, that can cause dots to show up in strange places, like the middle of a lake.

Source: The New York Times

2010 Census Apportionment/State Population data

This is the first batch of information from the 2010 census. It will be limited to population counts for the nation and states. By law, this data has to be reported to the president by Dec. 31.

The census uses this information to do apportionment, the allocation of congressional seats in the House of Representatives. Unlike 2000, when Oklahoma lost a congressional seat, there will be no change in the number of House seats this year.

The number of House seats–which now stands at 435–has been set since 1911. The first House of Representatives had just 65 seats in 1787. That rose to 105 after the 1790 Census.

For more on apportionment, check out this video from the Census Bureau:

Here’s some more information on previous population totals by state: Click for an interactive version

–Paul