New map of the US based on how dollar bills move | Hacker News Reader

New map of the US based on how dollar bills move

fastcoexist.com

119 pointsRougeFemme43 comments

This is incredibly similar to a map of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts - so similar, in fact, that at first I thought that's what they were displaying: http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm

Note in particular the split in Pennsylvania, which represents the Appalachian divide - a divide that is both geographical and economic in nature.

That isn't a coincidence. The federal reserve district banks distribute the notes to commercial banks in their districts, and, as worded on wikipedia: "A Federal Reserve Bank can retire notes that return from circulation by exchanging them for collateral that the bank posted for an earlier issue. Retired notes in good condition are held in the bank's vault for future issues."

He effectively came up with a way to reverse engineer the district boundaries.

So in other words, the movement of dollar bills is caused mainly by the federal reserve district banks redistributing them, and not by traveling individuals? That sure makes this map useless. I thought that dark line between New York and New England was fishy...

It's not completely useless. For instance, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and NYC are grouped together with only a faint line on the border of districts 3 and 5 and no line of the border of districts 2 and 3, with much stronger lines separating DC and Baltimore from the rest of district 5 and NYC from the rest of district 2.

Also, note the strong separation between Virginia and West Virginia, which are part of the same district, but no separation between West Virginia and any part of district 4.

You can definitely see the effect of the Federal Reserve districts on the map, but there are clearly other important factors.

And this is what happens when an expert in one field things he can solve a problem in another field with blind data analysis without any higher-level though, and makes theory-destroying incorrect assumptions along the way.

Some of the Federal Reserve Districts are divided. For example the "12-San Francisco" district is divided in three parts: Norwest, California and Salt Lake City. Perhaps they are Subdistricts of the Federal Reserve?

And there are some exceptions. For example, the north of Wisconsin and the north of Michigan are joined with the south of Wisconsin and Illinois, but they are in different Federal Reserve Districts. Perhaps there a cultural or economical reason for this?

I can do no more than guess, but I think you are right about the San Francisco district. It is a large district and the notes have to be physically carted back and forth to some distribution center, so it looks like they created three locations to do this - one in San Francisco, one in Seattle, and one in Salt Lake City.

I'd also wager that the relatively small discrepancies in the borders are due to the federal reserve being practical and slightly shifting the borders to be cost effective in transportation costs, to deal with one district having an excess of supply and a neighbor having an excess of demand, and so on. When I look at a lot of faint borders near each other on this map, it tells me that this is border movement caused by these kind of federal reserve actions.

The one thing that is blatantly obvious is that the author clearly did not find natural borders of economic activity as he or she claimed.

Similar, but not the same. California / Cascadia / Mormonland form different entities on his map, but are all lumped under San Francisco Federal Reserve District.

Click. Click. Ad. Click. Ad. Click. Click. Ad. ugh.

Running ad block, was confused why every 3 slides there was just this generic black and grey wavy pattern.

tl;dr install ad block

Yes, it all makes sense now! I love AdBlock so much : )

Sometimes ads are useful. In this case you still have the blank pages except they're blank, instead of being filled with a potentially useful ad.

No, they're not.

If I wanted to buy something right now, I wouldn't be reading HN, I'd be browsing Amazon or whatever site sells what I needed to buy.

A properly targeted ad is useful. By definition, if the ad works on you then it did something useful for both the advertiser and the person who saw the ad.

Ads obviously sometimes work, or else no one would do ads.

It does, however, help pay for the content you're consuming.

I already covered that in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5459646

ads also serve to inform you of the existence of products

Yes, how rude that a website operator wants to monetize their content.

Like everything else, there are smart and stupid ways of going about this legitimate objective. This is an example of the latter.

People will put up with a lot to get to a piece of content that's sufficiently compelling. This probably makes more money than a "smart" option.

And what would the smart way have been?

well. I'm no expert, but I can sure take a shot of some things you might want to avoid!

   *Not marking ads as ads
   *Presenting advertisements with the same presentation inline with normal 
    content, potentially confusing the reader.
   *Assuming that no one would block the ads
      -or recognizing they would and not caring
   *Not making use of the space in the... article!

I did not notice I could scroll down, either. Why didn't they put the ads there?!

Then he should charge money for it.

Of course he would never do that, because the content he added simply wasn't very valuable at all, and he's primarily saying, "Hey, look at what some other guy did! And while you're at it click on my ads!"

The researcher's explanation of his research: http://rocs.northwestern.edu/research/wgstory.html

Edit: this link doesn't explain this specific set of maps, but it does explain a little about how he got the idea of using wheresgeorge.com and what it allowed him to do (as of ~2009).

I do research with professor Brockmann at Northwestern University, not on human mobility, but investment networks.

If you want a quick overview of the idea behind this mapping of the US and the algorithms used, you should watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn32vavZqvg

It´s very strange that Memphis is over one of the boundaries. It's the only big named city over a border.

I looked in the map, because I don't know the zone. (I hope I readed the map correctly.)

Memphis is in south west corner of Tennessee state but the city continues informally but smoothly to the south in the Mississippi state. On the west side the city is the Mississippi river, and crossing the river is the Arkansas state. This area has much more green fields and few building zones.

So Memphis is not on the border, it is just right next to the east side of that border.

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=memphis&hl=en&ll=35.01...

Aren't there technically two cities, called "East" and "West" Memphis respectively?

At least in the map, West Memphis is much smaller than East Memphis.

Population from Wikipedia:

(East) Memphis: 672,277 (2011)

West Memphis: 26,245 (2010)

Memphis metropolitan: 1,316,100 (2010) (includes both)

The red linkage graphs would be much more comprehensible with edge bundling[1]. As it is, you get a ton of red lines that are hard to decipher. In order to show emphasis, some of the lines are orange.

[1] Something akin to https://www.evernote.com/shard/s9/res/11fab8e3-d623-4b58-a8d.... I'm sure there are libraries out that that will do this for you, but the algorithm in that paper isn't too hard to implement. :)

Your link yields "Access denied."

>normally someone in the audience says, 'Oh, this makes perfect sense."

This is exactly what I was thinking when I saw Pennsylvania cut in half (actually, I said "well no shit"). Those of us on the eastern side of that line generally regard western PA as a whole different state.

The northwest region reminded me of Cascadia/Cascadiopolis from Metatropolis.

http://io9.com/5169857/metatropolis-is-the-best-kind-of-urba...

It's fascinating; in the areas I am familiar with, you can see the Portland-Seattle corridor and the Deseret region.

Reminds me of the cultural maps of the US.

This only tracks paper currency, so it is an odd measure.

Paper currency generally travels on a person from place to place (as opposed to being mailed), egro the oddness is exactly what makes it a surprisingly good data source for this kind of work -- paper currency is a proxy for human movement.

Actually, assuming this is using only dollar bills, this is likely following the movement of poor humans. Credit and debit and large bills are typically in the hands of the middle to upper class.

To me this is an excellent map of how "trapped" people are in the situations they are in. The motility of the poor is something that has been restricted for thousands of years, and something we're supposed to be improving.

I understand this likely resembles a map of how far people will travel from major economic centres, but having grown up in an area of extremely high unemployment in the UK and having moved to an area of extremely low unemployment, making the poor willing to move has recognizable economic benefits. I know in Canada, where I now live, EI (unemployment) will pay moving expenses for someone to move to a lower unemployment area.

What's the deal with Pennsylvania being cut in half?

Pittsburgh is closer in proximity and culture to Ohio than it is to Philadelphia. The Appalachian Mountains bisect the state, and the areas outside the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metro areas have low population density. This area is sometimes called "Pennsyltucky"

Oh man, I forgot about the mountains. Most of the other non-state-border boundaries seem to be rivers, but I forgot mountains!

The border also roughly follows the path of I-81.

As a former Yinzer resident, I recall the James Carville line about Pittsburgh and Philly, with Alabama in the middle.

It is the border between two federal reserve districts.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm

Proof of Cascadia

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