No, the centroid in this case is only the geographical one and ignores population, transportation, and commerce. That's why it's not very good. I went through the list myself -- there are, after all, only fifty states -- and picked a city near the physical centroid.
California's centroid for this purpose is Fresno. I've also sometimes used Bakersfield. California should be two states, and indeed, when we're doing analysis where we aren't constraint by an overbearing client, we do break California, Texas, and Florida into multiple regions reflecting demographic reality.
Unfortunately, you also end up with things like Nevada's centroid being near Tonopah. The only time this method works okay is for the regularly-shaped states that placed their capitols near their centers.
I found the raw centroid points file online with a Google search last night, but forgot to bookmark the location, and now I can't turn it back up again. I must be using slightly different search terms than last night. After >14 hours working on the project at a stretch, I wasn't necessarily at my best. But it is out there if anyone wants to take a crack at finding the file, which is named "s_16mr06.zip" and contains a dBase file. I think my employer would probably consider the file I created, which is slightly more realistic, to be proprietary.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-07-27 04:08 pm (UTC)California's centroid for this purpose is Fresno. I've also sometimes used Bakersfield. California should be two states, and indeed, when we're doing analysis where we aren't constraint by an overbearing client, we do break California, Texas, and Florida into multiple regions reflecting demographic reality.
Unfortunately, you also end up with things like Nevada's centroid being near Tonopah. The only time this method works okay is for the regularly-shaped states that placed their capitols near their centers.
I found the raw centroid points file online with a Google search last night, but forgot to bookmark the location, and now I can't turn it back up again. I must be using slightly different search terms than last night. After >14 hours working on the project at a stretch, I wasn't necessarily at my best. But it is out there if anyone wants to take a crack at finding the file, which is named "s_16mr06.zip" and contains a dBase file. I think my employer would probably consider the file I created, which is slightly more realistic, to be proprietary.