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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Maps Show Where to Find Sports Fans
NEW YORK, N.Y. - December 15 - A new website, The
CommonCensus Sports Project, has started a survey to
find out where sports fans for major sports teams are
located. With over 15,000 votes each already for NFL
and MLB teams, and over 10,000 votes for NBA, NHL and
Division I-A NCAA football, a series of maps has been produced with revealing results.
Already, a firm line shows the exact boundary between
LA Angels and LA Dodgers fan areas, and one can see
exactly how Washington Redskins fans predominate not
just through Virginia but all the way down the coast
of North Carolina. While Dallas Cowboys fans cover a
larger geographic area than any other NFL team and
eclipse the Houston Texans, in baseball the Texas
Rangers and Houston Astros are almost perfectly
matched. And while the number of votes is still too
small to know for sure, current numbers suggest that
Yankees fans may be overwhelmed by their Red Sox
brethren in some parts of Upstate New York.
To participate, visitors enter their street address
and select the teams they support. No registration or
name is required. Then, when it comes time to
calculate the maps, a computer program goes through
each pixel in a map of the US and colors it according
to the most common team voted for, from the fifty
nearest participants. Colored areas are labelled and
areas without sufficient votes are left blank. A
separate map is produced for each league, and new maps
are calculated every few days to reflect new votes. A
clickable statistics map also produces exact fan
breakdowns for specific areas.
The site debuted on September 21, and is part of the
larger CommonCensus Map Project (commoncensus.org),
which seeks to draw a more representative map of the
US. It uses a survey to discover the geographic
boundaries people themselves feel at national and
local levels, as opposed to the traditional state and
county boundaries long set by politicians. Since its
inception, it has attracted more than 30,000
participants and has been featured on the front pages
of Wired.com and the Wall Street Journal Online.
The project was created by Michael Baldwin, a 25-year-old political science major from Yale University
who currently teaches English in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil.
The CommonCensus Sports Project can be accessed at:
http://www.commoncensus.org/sports.php
Contact: Michael Baldwin
Email: mjbaldwin@yahoo.com
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