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The "Almost Free" 50 Cent Deal.
We wanted to do a "free trial offer". Really. So
we put together some interesting and valuable stuff to give away.
But there was one problem. There was no
way to do a real trial if it were completely free.
In order to let people really know what to expect (make the payment to
paypal, receive the download from payloadz, look at the data) we have to
charge something. So we charge 50 cents.
Fascinating Stuff.
We started by doing a simple tabulation telling how many populated
households are in each state. That's interesting, but you can
probably get it for free from the US Census Bureau. To make it more
interesting we calculated the average household income for each
state. The fascinating part is that the state with the highest
average household income has nearly twice the average income of the state with the
lowest. The other states - and Washington DC - are pretty evenly
distributed between the highest and lowest. Just for fun, try
guessing where your state lies before getting your download.
Double Data, Twice.
When you get your tabulation from payloadz, you'll see two files.
One is a .csv (comma separated values) file for those of you who use
spreadsheets. Then you can sort it and crunch it to your heart's
content. The other file is for the rest of you - just double click
on it & it will open up without a spreadsheet. In both, the data
shows up twice. The first time it is sorted by "Average
Household Income", so you can see where your state falls as the
states go from highest household incomes to lowest. Then the data is repeated,
sorted by populated household count, so you can easily see where your
state falls compared to the others.
We DO normally give both files to satisfy both the spreadsheet users
and the non-spreadsheet users. We DON'T normally give multiple
copies of the data sorted differently. The reason for that is that
there are many ways to sort our data, depending on what the user is
interested in, and to provide every possibility would create lots of
confusing clutter. If you need it sorted differently than what we
have done, you'll need to get a spreadsheet, and you can easily sort it
any way you want.
A final note ...
We have removed all
vacant households and all group quarters (such as prisons and nursing
homes) from this tabulation to prevent them from skewing the data.
If a state has many vacant households (have you been near New
Orleans since hurricane Katrina hit? There's lots of empty
houses.) the average household incomes would be thrown way out of whack if we didn't remove the vacants.
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