@alwirtes @PowerOutageUS I'm in the same boat and am following out of curiosity. Basically I'm interested in how to disseminate regularly updated data in a way that is easy to consume and understand. In short: this is a cool media experiment for me 🤓
@mlanser @alwirtes @PowerOutageUS It needs to be a rate, though, eg 2% of customers without power. Otherwise smaller states don’t show up as often.
@dan613 @alwirtes @PowerOutageUS Agree. In fact, they should list % everywhere as main data point. They can then also include actual number as secondary data point to illustrate what the % means. This is similar to saying that the stock market is up or down X points which is irrelevant, especially when comparing exchanges. The number that matters is obviously % change, but the points can be added to illustrate the rate of change.
Percent is displayed at the county level but at the state level it becomes a much less useful statistic.
10% out in Texas means something very different than 10% out in Maine.
In my opinion, it is better to quantify the actual human impact of 1.2 million customers out vs 84k customers out.
I have had a bunch of people ask about it recently though, So I do plan to add it to the state page, but not as the primary statistic.
@PowerOutageUS @dan613 @alwirtes I think % on state level is useful for more general use cases. For example, NC has 100 counties. In hurricane season we can have outages in many counties and if I just want to know general outage then % is great. It does not negate value of % on county level. Finally, % across states is useful to compare impact. 100K homes w/o power in CA is not good, but it's really bad in NC. Using % makes it easier to see total impact. So both % and actual numbers are useful 🙂