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Alan Palazzolo

Minneapolis, Minnesota
Commenter for
1 year 14 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 02/13/13 at 03:44 pm in response to Build your own sales tax policy for Dayton's new budget

You can get to the "no-change" state (if tax rate and items taxed remained the same), if you click on Current Tax Rate, then click on Select None, then click on the item marked "Items currently taxed".

Posted on 01/31/13 at 04:43 pm in response to Budget 101: A graphic primer to Dayton's budget proposal

We have updated the piece a bit and it should be more friendly to print, though still about 9 pages. Thanks for the comments.

Posted on 12/20/12 at 04:07 pm in response to Firearms in Minnesota: by the numbers

Hi Matt.  Our intentions were definitely not meant to be biased with this piece but to simply present the limited data that is available on guns in Minnesota.

Regarding the NRA, we actually talked about this extensively but the NRA does not have a single metric for a state as a whole so it would be difficult to portray in this graphic.  They grade congresspeople and we discussed trying to "average" those grades, but this would be difficult, inaccurate, and misrepresent their...

Posted on 12/06/12 at 03:22 pm in response to Can you pass the mathematics GRAD test for high-school students?

As noted when you complete the test, the passing grade is based on a weighted scale as determined each year.  We used 2012 results as our base line, which was 80%.  Keep in mind, though, this test is not the one from 2012, it is only a sample test, so things don't match up perfectly.  So we are guessing a bit on whether a 80% would pass this specific test.  See the links in the footnote right below the test for more details.

Posted on 06/21/12 at 09:45 am in response to Mapping invasive species in Minnesota

Hey Rachel.  Thanks for the comments.  The data on the graph is a little more raw than on the map, which standardizes names a bit.  Basically, that is how the DNR data is, different names for the same thing.  I'll look into cleaning up the data for the graph bit.

Posted on 06/07/12 at 10:53 am in response to A day in the life of Nice Ride bikes

Hey Richard.  Good question.  We do not have data for the actual routes that bikes were taken; I do not belive Nice Ride has this data, or at least has not made it public (I do not know if there are GPS units on the bikes).  We did have start and end points for every ride taken, and therefore we could model a mostly ideal path the bike would take.  We utilized data from Open Street Map and utilized a technology...

Posted on 06/12/12 at 04:01 pm in response to A day in the life of Nice Ride bikes

Thanks Timothy.  How we built this may help answer some of these questions in more depth.  I'll address some of your comments here, though.  Overall, the static parts of the maps, routes and stations, are analysis from the whole year, while the animation is simulating a single day.

The stations (green dots) and the routes (blue lines) are taken from the whole 2011 year.  The weight of the routes (...

Posted on 05/17/12 at 04:24 pm in response to How we built the legislative bill explorer

Hi Steve.  You make some great points.  It is important to consider factors like taxpayers dollars, either going into the bill itself or as a consequence of the new law.  Unfortunately a lot of that data is not available in any format, let alone a standard format that would allow use to make such an application as this one without  significantly more resources dedicated to it.

We should have been a bit more explicit about what is "Controversial" in the Bill Explorer...

Posted on 04/11/12 at 11:26 am in response to Mapping record-breaking temperatures in 2012

Hi Dale.  Thanks for the kind words and finding those inaccuracies.  I have removed that aggregate statement as it is not very crucial to the presentation.