Silk, Pie Charts, and NFL Arrests

I stumbled into an interesting conversation yesterday on Twitter between a friend of mine and the twitter handle for Silk.co.  For those of you not familiar with Silk, it is a website that aggregates datasets that are relevant to current trends and events and provides some simple and easy to use data visualization tools for creating a stories using their data sets.

It all started when Silk published this tweet yesterday afternoon with a chart created from their site using a dataset of NFL arrests since 2000.

A look at salaries for City of Annapolis employees

It is budget time for the City of Annapolis.  The new mayor, Mike Pantelides, has proposed a series of job eliminations, furloughs, and lay-offs for the City of Annapolis.  The local Annapolis newspaper, The Capital, has done a great public service by publishing the salaries for city employees.  And even though I know most of the information is public record, I do have to disagree with their publishing the individual's name alongside the salary data.  I think it would have been sufficient to just publish each position without the name or with a non-traceable ID.  But I took the data they provided and turned it into a data visualization that you can explore to see exactly which departments comman the highest salaries and employ the most individuals in the city.