It was supposed to be a simple technology change to solve the problem of pumping water for women and children. Replace hand pumps with merry-go-rounds and when children play the water is pumped (like a windmill on its side) into a storage tank. Apparently $60 million was raised, including $10 million from the US government and $5 million from the founder of AOL.

Instead, in just three years, it has quietly become a study in product failure.

Costello visited more PlayPump sites, the next one in a more remote part of Mozambique with fewer children around. Women tell her that spinning the merry-go-rounds is often hard work without help, and hard especially for the older women. They tell her the old hand pumps were much easier, and that no-one consulted them about the change. The PlayPump just arrived.

Mission Local discusses a new map that overlays cupcake shops with gang territory

I am disappointed that the overlay does not have homicide data mapped, since that is the underlying data that makes the story interesting.

Is the occasional shoot-out bad for business? To the clientele of the St. Francis Fountain, four blocks east on 24th and a hangout for the young and hip: No.

“This is the best place in town for breakfast,” said Tex, a small man in denim work clothes drinking coffee Thursday morning at the counter.

He feels safe in the Mission as a whole, though he’s been warned to be careful to not seem especially gay anywhere around the intersection of 24th and Mission. “What I was told was, there are these gangs from El Salvador, and to be in the gang you have to kill a queer.

The data on crime is publicly available, as I have written before. It might be easiest to map cupcakes to the 3D maps already created to show areas with peak crime.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a graphic of health risks as they spread from the East to the West over twenty years.

This image shows the overlay between diabetes and obesity:

The CDC also discuss the correlation between obesity and exercise, which discusses how a caloric intake higher than a metabolic rate is a major factor.

Americans who live in Appalachia and the South are the least likely to be physically active in their leisure time. In many counties in that region, more than 29 percent of adults reported getting no physical activity other than at their regular job.

Unfortunately they do not yet have a graphic that maps specific types of food product consumption rates and change (e.g. soft drinks or even just corn syrup) to obesity. Another interesting overlay would be the density of fast-food restaurants and supermarkets relative to obesity. And another one might be the percentage of cars relative to bicycles to obesity.