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Comment by hanspeide | Hacker News Reader

How are the color pixels indicating device stacked in the map? If I only check Android I will see large green areas, but when I then check iPhone the same green areas will be red. Does that simply mean that there have been more iPhone than Android tweets in that particular spot?

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I made the map tiles, but Tom did the UI and compositing, so I'm not sure how the layers are combined. There are more iPhone tweets than any other source, so they will tend to be the most visible if they are given equal priority.

And this right here invalidates the article's conclusion, the simple number of iPhone tweets overwhelms the Android tweets. The map just shows who is more chatty, versus actual income disparity.

As a side note, I do find the map very interesting - it's just the article's conclusion that I'm not convinced of.

But they don't overwhelm the Android tweets everywhere, only in some places.

I agree that it is too big a leap to say that phone choice always indicates wealth, but I do think there is a connection.

No, it supports the article's conclusion. iPhones have far more tweets, yet are concentrated in high-income areas. Androids, with far less tweets, are nevertheless more widely and evenly spread in all areas - and dominant outside of wealthy areas.

The point of the map isn't to show income disparity, it's to show the smartphone brand of tweeters. The fact that it incidentally does show income disparity is what's interesting.

You should double-check the compositing. It looks like the iPhone layer is being drawn directly on top of the Android layer. So there is a good chance that if you reverse the composting order, the map will light up green.

The correct approach would be to decide a winner, or do some blending for every pixel on the map.

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