Edmonton’s population is up 12.1% according to the 2011 Federal Census

By Mack D. Male · February 8, 2012 at 11:25am

Statistics Canada today released the first set of information for the 2011 Federal Census, focused on population and dwelling counts. The population of Canada has increased 5.9% since the 2006 census, compared with 5.4% for the previous five-year period.

Canada’s population increased at a faster rate than the population of any other member of the G8 group of industrialized nations between 2006 and 2011. This was also the case between 2001 and 2006.

Canada’s population now sits at 33,476,688. Looking at the provinces, Alberta leads the country in growth with an increase of 10.8%, taking our population up to 3,645,257, which is about 11% of the country.

Increasingly we are an urban country. A total of 69.1% of the population lives in one of Canada’s 33 census metropolitan areas (CMAs), and that number is going up:

The rate of growth between 2006 and 2011 was 7.4% in CMAs as a group, above the national average of 5.9%. The two fastest growing CMAs were both in Alberta: Calgary, where the population rose 12.6%, and Edmonton, where it increased 12.1%.

Here’s a look at the fastest growing CMAs in the country:

Looking at federal electoral districts in the Edmonton region, Edmonton-Leduc was the fastest growing with 28% growth since 2006 census, followed by Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont at 22%.

Looking at Edmonton more generally, the population of the city now sits at 812,201 while the population of the CMA is now 1,159,869. Here’s the population for the City and the CMA over the last fifteen years:

And here’s the percentage increase over that same time period:

Edmonton is now the sixth largest CMA in the country, and we’re growing more quickly than anticipated.

We’ll have to wait until May 29 to learn more about the age and gender breakdown, September 19 to learn more about households, marital status, and structure types, and October 24 to learn more about language.

The City of Edmonton is conducting another municipal census in April this year, and is looking for 1400 people to act as census workers. You can apply in person at City Hall. You can learn more about the municipal census here.

You can learn more about the 2011 Federal Census here, and also check out The Daily for today.

Twitter statistics for City Council’s vote on the financial framework for the downtown arena

By Mack D. Male · October 27, 2011 at 11:55pm

After a long public hearing on Tuesday, City Council yesterday debated the proposed financial framework and ultimately whether or not they wanted to proceed with the downtown arena project. They voted 10-3 in favor of the framework, and also voted to spend $30 million to complete the design to 60%. Here’s my analysis of the the arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

By graphing the tweets per minute, you can very clearly see the time the vote took place (~3:03pm):

I was curious to know if the things people were tweeting before and after that moment were different. Here’s a word cloud of the tweets prior to the vote:

Caterina was mentioned a lot, which makes sense considering he turned out to be the surprise dealmaker of the day. The other Councillors were mentioned quite frequently too, as myself and others tweeted their comments.

Here’s a word cloud of the tweets posted after the vote:

It’s very interesting that “Edmonton” was tweeted so often after the vote passed. There were a lot of tweets similar to “Edmonton will get a new arena” that were retweeted after the vote. You can also see that “Iveson” was fairly prominent after the vote, reflecting the large number of tweets about his final remarks on the deal.

Other stats:

It was another busy day for tweets in Edmonton with more than 42,000 posted by Edmontonians. That works out to an average of about 30 per minute.
More than 880 users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 5.0 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 43.
Roughly 14% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 29% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

I gave Paula a run for her money, but she remained the most retweeted user on the arena issue!

UPDATE: I’m always looking for better ways to analyze tweets. Finding a good, reliable way to do sentiment analysis (are tweets positive or negative) is a challenge, partially because tweets are so short and because they usually include weird entities like hashtags (weird from a natural language processing point-of-view). To analyze the arena-related tweets, I used uClassify’s Sentiment Classifier. Here are the results:

I would say this is pretty much as expected. Tweets before the vote probably expressed less emotion one way or the other. Most people tweeting after the vote seemed happy with the decision Council made.

Twitter statistics for today’s public hearing on the proposed arena deal

By Mack D. Male · October 25, 2011 at 11:59pm

I think it’s fair to say that the public hearing on the proposed arena deal was the talk of Twitter in Edmonton today. Here’s my quick analysis of all arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users today between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

A word cloud of the 4500+ tweets:

Here’s a breakdown of tweets per minute (you can clearly see the lunch and dinner breaks):

Other stats:

Thanks largely to the arena-related tweets, more than 44,000 tweets were posted by Edmontonians today. That works out to an average of about 31 tweets per minute.
More than 800 different users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 6.3 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 24.
Roughly 17% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 25% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

Council voted to deal with the issue at 9:30am tomorrow (Wednesday). You can watch or listen live here.

the edmontonian: statistics

By Mack D. Male · September 10, 2011 at 8:46am

When I received the email from Jeff & Sally informing me that the edmontonian would soon be ending, I was shocked. I didn’t see it coming. Yesterday was the final day, and I’m still sad about it! I know they’ll be back at some point, but the edmontonian itself is no more. I’m glad I got to interview the duo about the decision, but I also wanted to do a tribute post of sorts. Fortunately, I knew right away what it should be – statistics!

The following statistics cover the edmontonian from the very first post on June 15, 2009 up to but not including the announcement on August 29, 2011.

Number of posts: 1572
Number of words written: 532,595
Number of comments: 3865

That works out to an average of 2.8 posts per day. Here’s what the breakdown looks like per month:

As you can see they posted slightly more at the beginning and then settled into a steady rhythm. The most posts came in July 2009 (perhaps due to the airport debate) while the fewest came in December 2009. The monthly average was 58.2 posts.

Here’s the breakdown by time of day:

Most entries were posted between 10am and 12pm, with another spike between 3pm and 4pm. A significant number of the edmontonian’s posts were headlines, which Jeff often posted mid-morning, so the graph doesn’t really surprise me. This word cloud shows you just how much of a fixture the headlines were at the edmontonian:

That was generated by including all 1572 post titles. If you remove those two words, you get this word cloud:

I didn’t realize how prominently the time of year was featured until I went through this exercise. It shows up in the tags as well. Very interesting! The average length of a post title was 29 characters or 5 words, with the longest being 30 words (fittingly that post was among the shortest for content, containing only images). This one was also quite long at 28 words.

One of my favorite things about the edmontonian was their willingness to link to other stuff. They linked a lot. In total, they posted 17,416 unique links! Of those, 2217 were links to their own stuff. A significant chunk of the rest went to local media. Here are the domains they linked to more than 100 times:

edmontonjournal.com (3170)
theedmontonian.com (2217)
edmontonsun.com (1551)
cbc.ca (983)
edmonton.ctv.ca (768)
630ched.com (587)
metronews.ca (457)
globaltvedmonton.com (349)
youtube.com (345)
shareedmonton.ca (342)
imdb.com (297)
yeglive.ca (272)
inews880.com (266)
seemagazine.com (241)
twitter.com (238)
vueweekly.com (224)
edmonton.ca (204)
calgaryherald.com (196)
edmontonexaminer.com (191)
facebook.com (181)
thegatewayonline.ca (168)
vancouversun.com (121)
en.wikipedia.org (110)

The average length of a post at the edmontonian was 2109 characters or 399 words. The longest was 2135 words. Here’s what a word cloud of all the post content looks like:

All Edmonton, all the time.

Without a doubt, the edmontonian was good at generating a discussion about the things happening in our city. I think it’s safe to say that a lot of that discussion probably took place off the blog (they’ve posted more than 8500 tweets) but I’m still impressed by the number of comments they amassed (an average of 2.5 per post). I would have loved their numbers during my first three years of blogging! This post had the most comments at 96.

These statistics are interesting, but of course they don’t reflect all the passion and hard work that Jeff & Sally have put into the edmontonian over the past three years. They’ve set the bar high for local blogs!

Homicide Rates in Canada: Statistics & Trends

By Mack D. Male · August 10, 2011 at 12:00pm

About a month ago I shared some statistics about Edmonton’s homicide rate. As an initial effort, I think I got my point across: the homicide rate in Edmonton over the last thirty years has been trending downward and is not that different from other large cities in Canada. I have since done some additional research on this subject and would like to share what I have learned.

The graphs below generally compare the ten largest census metropolitan areas in Canada. I have used the homicide rate (the number of homicides per 100,000 people in the CMA) to compare rather than the absolute number of homicides. Where appropriate, I have included the overall Canadian rate and the average of the ten largest CMAs. The data all comes from Statistics Canada (the 2010 information is here). You can click on any graph to see a larger version.

Here are the homicide rates over the last thirty years:

You can see a few spikes (for Ottawa-Gatineau and Winnipeg in particular) but overall the rates are all pretty similar.

Here are the highest recorded homicide rates:

Nearly every location has had spikes at one time or another. But a few places consistently record the highest homicide rates:

You can see that Winnipeg has recorded the highest homicide rate among large cities the most, followed by Ottawa-Gatineau. Edmonton has recorded the second highest homicide rate among large cities most often, followed by Vancouver.

Here are the average homicide rates over the last thirty years:

Half of the ten largest cities are below the Canadian average. As a result, the average for the ten largest cities isn’t that much higher than the Canadian average.

Here is Edmonton’s homicide rate compared against the overall rate in Canada and the average of the ten largest cities. You can see that is trending downward, despite spikes in 2005/2006:

Over the last thirty years, Edmonton has never recorded a homicide rate lower than the Canadian rate. Only three times has Edmonton’s homicide rate been lower than the average for the ten largest cities:

As homicide rates in Canada have generally been trending downward, I thought it would be useful to look at the rates by decade. Here are the average homicide rates by decade since 1981:

You can see that with the exception of Winnipeg, every location recorded a lower average homicide rate in the period 2001-2010 than they did in the period 1981-1990.

This graph shows the change a little more clearly:

Every location’s average rate decreased in the 1990s. Only three locations (Edmonton, London, and Winnipeg) have recorded increases since 2000, and only Winnipeg’s was enough to increase past 1990 levels.

What’s next?

Today, our city’s new violence reduction action plan was unveiled. You can read the whole thing in PDF here. The report concludes:

The problem of violence in society is complex and multi-faceted. It requires diligent, ongoing coordinated work across a number of agencies and organizations. This includes other orders of government, who have information and resources that will be required in order that solutions be comprehensive, and sustainable over the long-term.

The City and its key partners will continue their efforts to understand and address the root causes of violence and maintain order and safety in our community, keeping the livability of Edmonton among the best in Canada and the world.

I think understanding where we’re at is an important part of unraveling this mystery. Hopefully the information I have shared above will help in that regard. I look forward to the community conversations slated to take place this fall.

In a follow-up post, I’ll take a closer look at Edmonton’s homicide rate in the context of our demographics, economic situation, and other factors.

Edmonton’s Homicide Rate: How much has changed in 30 years?

By Mack D. Male · July 7, 2011 at 7:54pm

Reading that we’ve had 28 murders so far this year in Edmonton is disheartening, as others have noted. And without a doubt something needs to be done to understand why this happening and what we can do to stop it. But has the picture really changed all that much from previous years?

Our homicide rate (the number of homicides per 100,000 people) currently sits at roughly 2.41. That compares to Winnipeg’s 2.08 (they have had 16 murders so far this year). If we extrapolate for the rest of the year, we’d finish with a homicide rate of roughly 4.82. That would indeed be our highest ever. However, a rate that high has only been experienced in large cities twice in the last 30 years:

Given that history, I would be shocked if we finished 2011 with a homicide rate above 4.8 (which would equate to 56 murders).

Here’s the average homicide rate for each of those cities:

And here’s what the rate looks like from year to year (it appears Montréal has experienced the most steady decline – we should find out what they did):

As for the title of Murder Capital of Canada – that distinction clearly goes to Winnipeg. It has led large cities in murders more in the last 30 years than any other:

In recent years, it has generally been Winnipeg #1 and Edmonton #2, or vice versa.

It sounds bad: “we’ve had more murders in the first six months of 2011 than we did all of last year”. That’s the kind of statement that will spur us into action. But I don’t think the situation is really all that different from previous years.

The other negative side effect of all of this is the knock on Edmonton’s image throughout Canada and around the world. Countless stories have been written about our homicide rate. I was interviewed by CTV about this today. I said that the words ‘homicide’ and ‘murder’ have been mentioned by Edmontonians on Twitter about 1200 times in the last month or so. What I didn’t get to do in the interview was compare that to previous years:

The absolute number of mentions is higher this year than it was in the last two years, but so is the total number of tweets overall. So I normalized the data. If the same number of tweets had been posted in June 2009 as were posted in June 2011, the words ‘homicide’ and ‘murder’ would have been mentioned more two years ago than today. All this to say: Edmontonians are talking about this topic, but perhaps not more than they have in the past. I would guess that other Canadians are talking about our homicide rate more than is normal, however.

UPDATE (8/5/2011): I updated the second paragraph to better reflect the way Statistics Canada calculates homicide rates, so that the numbers better align with the rest of the post. I had originally stated that extrapolating for the rest of 2011 would result in a homicide rate above 5.0, when it should have been 4.8. My argument remains the same – statistically speaking, that is very unlikely.

Edmonton Twittersphere: One Week, Three Big Events

By Mack D. Male · May 4, 2011 at 5:38pm

There certainly has been a lot to talk about over the last seven days! The royal wedding, the death of Osama bin Laden, and the 41st Canadian federal election have all been in the news around the world. They’ve been the hot topics on Twitter as of late too. I decided to take a closer look at Edmonton’s tweeting of the three events.

First, here is the number of tweets about each topic, plotted per hour over the last week. From the chart, we can see that the Bin Laden and election news was spikier than the royal wedding (think: people tweeting as soon as they heard about Bin Laden versus people tweeting over the three or four hours the wedding took).

For the data labeled #RoyalWedding I took any tweet that contained “wedding”, “middleton”, “cambridge”, “william”, or “kate”. For the data labeled Bin Laden, I took any tweet that contained “bin laden”, “binladen”, “osama”, or “obama”. For the data labeled “#elxn41” I took any tweet that contained “elxn41” or “yegfed”. This definition applies to the rest of the data in this post as well.

Here’s a closer look at the royal wedding tweets:

Obviously one of the more interesting aspects of the royal wedding was that it took place in the middle of the night for us here in Edmonton. This chart gives you a sense of that. The orange line is the number of tweets posted per hour on April 29th, and you can see there were quite a few more tweets posted in the middle of the night than either the day before or after (the blue lines).

Here’s a word cloud that shows all of the local tweets posted on April 29th (29,625). You can see the wedding definitely stands out:

The most consistently talked about topic of the three has definitely been the election. We set a new record for the number of tweets posted in a single day on election day (May 2) at 37,664. That’s fitting, considering our record day last year was also an election day. This chart compares the two:

Obviously more tweets were posted overall on May 2, because there are more local users on Twitter now. What’s interesting to me is that the number of election-specific tweets is about the same for both!

Here’s a word cloud for election day:

Though more people tweeted about the election over the week, it was the Bin Laden news that got everyone tweeting at the same time. I think it’s the new local record holder for peak tweets per hour:

This chart is imperfect, of course – it changes depending on the search keywords you use. But I think it still illustrates the point. For Crosby’s goal, I used “canada”, “crosby”, “goal”, and “score”.

Finally, here’s a word cloud for May 1, the day the Osama bin Laden news broke:

Even though the news came out very late in the day, you can see that it was the most talked about topic of the day.

I wonder what the next big event on Twitter in Edmonton will be!

First look at Canada’s new Open Data portal: data.gc.ca

By Mack D. Male · March 18, 2011 at 7:14pm

Yesterday the Government of Canada launched its open data portal at data.gc.ca. Open Data is one of three Open Government Initiatives, the other two being Open Information and Open Dialogue. Stockwell Day, President of the Treasury Board and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, issued a statement today on the launch:

“Today, I am pleased to announce the next step in our government’s commitment to enhancing transparency and accountability to Canadians. The expansion of open government will give Canadians the opportunity to access public information in more useful and readable formats, enable greater insight into the inner workings of the Government and empower citizens to participate more directly in the decision-making process.”

He goes on in the statement to say that Canada has historically led the way in providing information to citizens. Lately though, we’ve definitely fallen behind. I’m glad to see us moving forward once again. This development is no doubt the result of lots of work by many passionate Canadians, such as David Eaves. Here’s what he posted yesterday:

The launch of data.gc.ca is an important first step. It gives those of us interested in open data and open government a vehicle by which to get more data open and improve the accountability, transparency as well as business and social innovation.

David does a good job in that post of highlighting some of the issues the site currently faces, such as some problematic wording in the licensing, so I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I figured I’d do what I always do when I get new datasets to play with – make some charts!

The open data portal says there are 261,077 datasets currently available. Just 781 of those are “general” datasets, the rest are geospatial. That’s an impressive number of geospatial datasets, but they are somewhat less accessible (and perhaps less interesting) to the average Canadian than the general datasets. It looks like you need to be able to work with an ESRI Shape File to use most of them.

There are lots of general datasets you might find interesting, however. For example, here’s the Consumer Price Index by city:

Here’s another dataset I thought was interesting – the number of foreign workers that have entered Canada, by region:

Have you ever wondered how much of each type of milk Albertans consume? You can find that out:

There’s actually a fairly broad range of datasets available, such as weather, agriculture, economics, and much more. As David said, it’s a good first step.

I’m excited to see more ministries get involved, and I hope to see the number of datasets available increase over time. I’d also love to see the licensing change, perhaps by adopting the UK Open Government License as David suggested. Exciting times ahead!

Still Trending Down: Computing-related graduates in Alberta

By Mack D. Male · March 15, 2011 at 7:49pm

If we’re serious about shifting the Alberta Advantage, I think we need to focus on technology. If we really want to be in the sweet spot of adding lots of value, participating in the economy of the future, and being globally competitive, we need smart people who can be creative and innovative in the appropriate sectors and industries. Technology is absolutely going to be at the heart of any sector or industry that will enable us to be world-class and trendsetting, there’s just no question about it.

That’s why this graph absolutely shocked me:

The data comes from the University of Alberta, but I think it is representative of the province as a whole.

The number of students graduating in the fields of Computing Science and Computer Engineering in Alberta is trending downward, with no correction in sight. How can we build the economy of the future when the picture looks like this?

Here’s a bit more detail – with the number of graduates broken out by degree/program:

I haven’t looked, but I suspect enrollment numbers would be similar (that is, I don’t think an incredible number of students register in computing-related programs and then switch out).

Bill Gates has been talking about the need for more students to take up computer science for years now. There’s more demand than supply, even when you factor in immigration. The need for us to stay competitive in this regard is well-documented. It looks like we’re falling further behind.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how we get more students interested in computer-related degrees. But I do think it is important to consider this data when we talk about the success of our provincial technology sectors, and indeed when we consider shifting the Alberta Advantage.

Fun with Open Data and Excel: Edmonton’s Busiest Streets

By Mack D. Male · February 10, 2011 at 9:18pm

Today the City of Edmonton added a new dataset to the open data catalogue – average daily street traffic volumes from 2004-2009. Here’s the description:

Include traffic counts obtained with automatic traffic recorders over the past six years. The volume shown is a total of all vehicles in both directions, over a 24 hour period, for a typical weekday in a year. Volumes shown as a dash "-" indicate no count was undertaken that year. Seasonal adjustments are made to reflect an average weekday during the year. An increase or decrease in volume does not necessarily indicate a trend for a given roadway. Road construction or the introduction of more advanced equipment in 2009 affect the traffic volume numbers.

I’d like to build something interesting with this data, perhaps as part of a future ShareEdmonton release. But to start, I decided to open the data up in Microsoft Excel, something I often do with new datasets. Here’s what I discovered.

First, a few summary points:

There are 1496 street locations in the dataset.
Of those, 823 were counted in 2009. The year with the most counted locations was 2006, at 1076. Just 32 locations were counted every year (2004-2009). There were 531 locations counted in three years or more.
One of the first things I noticed is that every count ends in zero. I know the description outlines that the data is an average, adjusted seasonally, and perhaps for other reasons, but I wonder how close to reality the numbers really are.

Looking at 2009 simply because it is the most recent, there’s a hint of a long tail for the counted locations:

Here are the 200 busiest locations in Edmonton according to the 2009 count:

View Larger Map

To create that map, I used a free utility called Excel to KML. There are all kinds of useful free KML tools online!

Here are the top ten busiest locations in Edmonton, according to the 2009 count:

Calgary Trail SW North of Gateway Park Road SW
Capilano Bridge
178 Street South of 81 Avenue
Highway 216 NE North of Sherwood Park Freeway NE
Anthony Henday Drive North of 87 Avenue
HIghway 216 NE North of Baseline Road NE
Anthony Henday Drive West of Calgary Trail
170 Street North of 95 Avenue
Groat Road North of Victoria Park Road
Highway 216 NE North of Whitemud Drive NE

Some of those are expected, some perhaps not. I decided to look at locations that were counted in at least three different years. If you look at the average daily volumes for that subset, here are the top ten busiest locations in Edmonton:

Quesnell Bridge
Yellowhead Trail West of 231 Street
Calgary Trail SW North of Gateway Park Road SW
Capilano Bridge
Whitemud Drive West of 149 Street
Yellowhead Trail West of Fort Road
Cloverbar Bridge
Yellowhead Trail West of 97 Street
Yellowhead Trail West of 107 Street
Yellowhead Trail West of 127 Street

Plotting the top 25 on a map gives a better sense of the really busy roads – Yellowhead Trail and Whitemud Drive:

View Larger Map

Interesting, isn’t it? Of course, it could get a lot more interesting with some mashups. I’d love to have collision data for the City of Edmonton, to see how closely the number of collisions is correlated with traffic volumes. That’s just one example.

Check out the new dataset in the open data catalogue. If you do something interesting with it, I’d love to hear about it!