Author: Adam DuVander

Valentine’s Day, now seen as the celebration of love, is observed all over the world. Yet, it’s not all the same paper hearts and Hallmark cards that the United States has come to expect. Each country and region celebrate a little differently, as we’ve shown on the map below.

View Valentine’s Day Celebrations Around the World in a full screen map

It is often more useful to see data (based on this Wikipedia page) plotted on a map. You can make your own map with open data here. Then explore each country, or read on for more on how the world sees love on February 14.

Valentine’s Day in the United States

A U.S. celebration of Valentine’s Day wouldn’t be complete without exchanging cards with loved ones — or potential loved ones. In fact, roughly 190 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year in the United States. This 190 million does not include the cards that are exchanged by children in schools — that number would be overwhelming. Valentine’s Day in the U.S. has become increasingly commercialized as the holiday encourages consumers to spend money on loved ones. In 2010, Americans spent $108 per person on Valentine’s Day and that number rose to a whopping $131 just three years later in 2013.

Valentine’s Day in Latin America

Valentine’s Day is referred to by a variety of different names throughout Latin America. From “Dia del Carino” (Affection Day) in Guatemala to “El Dia del Amor y la Amistad” (Day of Love and Friendship) in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico, these Latin American countries may celebrate Valentine’s Day a bit differently than those in the U.S., but their celebrations are no less special. Not only do some of these Latin American countries recognize this holiday as one for significant others, but in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico, people also celebrate and perform acts of appreciation for their friends on Valentine’s Day.

Some Latin American countries don’t celebrate their version of Valentine’s Day in February. In Brazil, “Dia dos Namorados” ("Lovers’/“Boyfriends’/Girlfriends’ Day”) is actually celebrated over the summer, in June. This is because February 14th falls very close to the Brazilian Carnival. Due to this absence of Valentine’s Day celebrations in February, Brazil is a very popular tourist spot during February for single folks from the U.S. who wish to avoid all things Valentine’s Day-related.

Colombians and other Latin American countries also partake in “Amigo Secreto” (Secret Friend) during Valentine’s Day. Similar to “Secret Santa” at Christmastime, during Amigo Secreto, participants are randomly assigned a person to whom they must give a gift.

Valentine’s Day in Europe

American Valentine’s Day culture has largely impacted how European countries celebrate Valentine’s Day. The countries most influenced by the U.S. cultural interpretation of Valentine’s Day are Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The Swedish name for Valentine’s Day can be translated into “All Hearts’ Day," which was launched in the 1960s by the flower industry in an effort to increase spending and also due to American influence. Flower sales for All Hearts Day in Sweden are only exceeded by flower sales for one other holiday: Mother’s Day. In Norway and Denmark, much like in the United States, people take the time to eat a romantic dinner with a loved one or send cards or roses on Valentine’s Day.

The United Kingdom celebrates Valentine’s Day much like the United States with just under half of the population spending money on their Valentines. 25 million cards are sent each year. In Ireland, those who seek love make a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Valentine in Dublin and pray in hope of finding love on Valentine’s Day.

Similar to many Latin American countries, some European countries also view Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to celebrate friendship rather than romantic love. In both Finland and Estonia, Valentine’s Day is a day to remember friends, and is called ystävänpäivä in Finland which translates to “Friend’s Day.” Estonia’s word for Valentine’s Day also translates to “Friend’s Day.”

Romania has also started to celebrate Valentine’s Day. This has drawn backlash from several groups, institutions and nationalist organizations who condemn Valentine’s Day for being superficial and an import from Western countries.

Valentine’s Day in Asia: Religious Bans

In some countries throughout Asia, Valentine’s Day is banned for religious reasons. When Valentine’s Day was first introduced to Pakistan in the 1990s, the Jamaat-e-Islami political party banned the celebration of the holiday. Since then, the local Peshawar government, other cities, and Islamabad High Court have all denounced the holiday. Despite this, there are still those who celebrate the holiday.

Recently in Iran, Islamic teachers have criticized Valentine’s Day because the holiday contradicts Islamic culture. In 2011, the Iranian printing works owners’ union issued a directive banning the printing and distribution of any goods promoting the holiday, including cards, gifts, and teddy bears.

Religious police banned the sale of all Valentine’s Day items in Saudi Arabia in 2002 and 2008, telling shop workers to remove any red items because the day is considered a Christian holiday. This ban has actually created a black market for roses and wrapping paper. In 2012, religious police arrested more than 140 Muslims for celebrating the holiday and confiscated all red roses from flower shops. Muslims are not allowed to celebrate the holiday, and non-Muslims can only celebrate behind closed doors.

Valentine’s Day in Asia: Lawful Celebrations

Valentine’s Day was first introduced in Japan in 1936 by a cake company that decided to run an advertisement. The Japanese custom that only women give chocolates to men may have originated from the translation error of the cake company executive during the initial campaigns. In the 1980s, the Japanese National Confectionery Industry Association launched a campaign to make March 14 a “reply day,” where men are expected to return the favor to those who gave them chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Men are expected to return gifts that are at least two or three times more valuable than the gifts they received on Valentine’s Day.

In South Korea, women give chocolate to men on February 14, and men give non-chocolate candy to women on March 14 (White Day). On April 14 (Black Day), those who did not receive anything on February 14 or March go to a Chinese-Korean restaurant to eat black noodles and lament their ‘single life.’

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The map above provides a glimpse into how various countries around the world celebrate Valentine’s Day. No matter how, or even when or if you celebrate the holiday, take some time to remember your friends and loved ones. And if you’re still heartbroken about the results of Super Bowl LII, cheer up by checking out your favorite team’s records in Super Bowl Winners and Losers.

When you have hundreds of locations to plot on a map, speed counts. You likely want to be able to convert addresses to map markers faster than one per second. Even if you only have a single record at a time, your user experience is negatively impacted by delays of even milliseconds.

Since customers of our batch geocoding service rely on fast results, we set out to compare some of the top geocoders to see how quickly they could turn around several hundred addresses. The results below show what we learned testing the geocoders from Google, Bing, and MapQuest, as well as some other geocoders we considered.

What is Geocoding?

Geocoding is the process of converting an address, city, state, zip code or postal code into mappable coordinates. In order to use most customized online mapping tools, such as Google Maps, you’ll need a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates for each of your locations, so each will need to be geocoded.

That’s how our page on geocoding addresses describes it.

For out geocoder tests, we used full addresses, including city, state, and zip code. There are many methods that cartographers can use to turn an address into a plot-able point. You can approximate with existing segments of a street, or use parcel-level centroids, to mention two. Regardless of the method, the result is what matters. Ideally, you’d find an accurate point in the shortest amount of time.

Methodology

Before getting to the results, it’s important to understand how we approached our geocoding test. Our goal was to provide a setting to get the most accurate comparison possible, so we used the same approach with all geocoders.

Our dataset comprises 670 complete addresses. We opted to only include US addresses, namely a subset of those included in this dataset. Each address was URL-encoded and pre-compiled into the URL format used by each geocoder:

• Google Free
  https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=ENCODED_ADDRESS
• Google Premium:
  https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=ENCODED_ADDRESS&new_forward_geocoder=true&sensor=false&client=CLIENT_NAME&channel=CHANNEL_NAME&signature=PRE_CALCULATED_SIGNATURE
• Bing:
  http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?key=API_KEY&query=ENCODED_ADDRESS
• MapQuest:
  http://www.mapquestapi.com/geocoding/v1/address?key=API_KEY&location=ENCODED_ADDRESS

We stored the test URLs in four separate files, one address per line in each file. Using Python’s grequests library, we split the tests into equal-sized groups, running each group’s geocoder requests concurrently until all completed. We tested each geocoding provider with groups of 10, 30, 67, and 100. We tested each group multiple times, using the median result.

If you’re interested, you can see the benchmarking code on GitHub.

Geocoding Results

Group size	Bing	Google Free	Google Pro	MapQuest
100	4.987568	17.976482	14.626393	13.215507
67	6.509502	18.503981	12.980358	14.202346
30	13.812446	24.373537	13.332298	17.450716
10	28.278917	31.867758	26.12703	37.086448

Response Time

The first thing we can notice in the response times is how big of a difference concurrent requests make. With the smallest group size (10 requests at a time), all geocoders took about 30 seconds to process all 670 addresses. The biggest difference came in the largest group sizes (67 and 100 requests at a time), where Bing shined. Microsoft’s geocoder returned results for 670 addresses in under five seconds at its fastest.

As expected, Google Pro outpaced its free counterpart. At the largest group sizes, Google Pro was 23-43% faster than the free version. We should note that Google Free is built to cap out at a rate limit of 50 requests per second. Google Pro is decidedly the better option if speed and capacity are requirements (the free version also rate limits at 2,500 requests per day). In our informal tests calling Google’s free geocoder from JavaScript (the same method used on BatchGeo), we hit rate limiting that we did not see in our tests from a server.

Except in the smallest group size, MapQuest kept close to the others. The original web map company remains competitive.

Error Rates

Despite sometimes sending as many as 100 requests in a single second, every geocoder stood up well to the load. During our tests, only the free version of the Google geocoder ever returned an error, and that was only four times out of over 2,500 tests, or 0.1% of the time.

The low error rate is surprising, given that many APIs have rate limits, published or unpublished. But as mentioned above, these tests from the server did not appear to trigger rate limiting. Even the tests with 100 concurrent connections did not activate rate limits. While 670 addresses is enough to be a significant sample, it’s likely not seen as an abusive level of requests.

Accuracy of Results

As mentioned earlier, fast geocoder results are only useful if the data returned is accurate. However, since our focus here was on producing a speed benchmark, the accuracy of what is returned was not included. Further, determining whether a geocoded result is “correct” is up to many different interpretation methods. What determines the right answer? How close to the true result is “close enough?” Does the accepted range change based on the size of the property at the address?

Each of these questions is worthy of its own individual investigation, well beyond the scope of our speed benchmark.

Other Geocoders

Lastly, we did consider other geocoders that were not included in this research. Among them were Mapbox and LocationIQ. In both cases, our tests were rate limited, often even in the smallest groups of requests. Each likely has paid versions, which we’d be open to comparing in a future tests.

Fast Batch Geocoding with Built-In Maps

If you’re looking for the fastest way to convert a list of addresses into a map, batch geocoding is your answer. Specifically, our quick and easy mapping tool that makes geocoding as simple as copy-paste from Excel or any other spreadsheet.

With college football bowl game season upon us, the whole nation seems to be celebrating the pigskin. Yet, some parts of the United States are more naturally football-inclined. Of course, there’s Texas, where the game is as big as the state, but there are a handful of other football hubs, as we discovered when we mapped every single college football player by their hometown.

View Where College Football Players Are From in a full screen map

Click around the map for yourself—it contains 25,000 NCAA football players. Or, read on to see the insights we’ve snapped from the map.

Top States for Football

The map makes it clear what some already knew—there are states that tend to produce more college football players than others. There are five states in particular that are home to more college football players than any other states in the U.S.

State	Count
Texas	2,877
Florida	2,589
California	2,335
Georgia	1,950
Ohio	1,080

As we’ve mentioned, Texas tops the list of states with the most college football players. With 2,877 college football players who call the state home, Texas surely wins in producing these college athletes. Second on our list is Florida. The Sunshine State can claim 2,589 college football players as their own. California concludes the top three, flaunting a whopping 2,335 college football players. These top three states are all home to 2,000 or more college football players.

Georgia earns its place in the top five states with just under 2,000 college football players—1,950 to be exact. We close out the top five states for college football players with Ohio. The state has 1,080 players and is the last state to have 1,000 or more college football players call it home.

Curious about the states that produce the least amount of college football players? The following five states have all produced less than 25 college football players. Wyoming has 23 college football who claim the state as home. Maine and New Hampshire both have 21 homegrown college players. Arkansas has 14 and Vermont has the very lowest with only two college football players to claim as their own.

Top Hometowns

There are over 5,000 distinct hometowns for college football players.

That breaks up further into 3,000 cities that have two or more college football players claiming them as their hometown. There are 1,215 cities that have produced five or more college football players. Exactly 529 cities are home to 10 or more college football players. As for cities with 50 or more college football players calling them home, there are 49. And finally, 17 cities can claim 100 or more football players as homegrown.

The top ten cities for producing college football players might not be a much of a surprise. A large majority of these cities are located within the top 5 states for football players.

Hometown	Count
Houston, TX	319
Miami, FL	296
Jacksonville, FL	213
Atlanta, GA	204
New Orleans, LA	179
Charlotte, NC	160
Tampa, FL	154
Cincinnati, OH	154
Dallas, TX	144
Chicago, IL	134

Just as expected for the number one top state for raising college football players, a Texas city produces the most college football players. Which city in the football player hub produces the most for the state? Houston, Texas. Houston is home to 319 college football players, which is more than any other city.

Second place goes to Miami, Florida which is home to 296 football players. Rounding out the top three is another city in Florida: Jacksonville, Florida, which is the hometown of 213 college football players. Atlanta, Georgia is home to 204 college football players, ending the 200 plus, and our top four cities.

The rest of the cities on our top ten list are all home to 100 or more college football players.

Most Popular Colleges for Houston, Miami, Jacksonville, and Atlanta

Our top four cities: Houston, Miami, Jacksonville, and Atlanta also have certain colleges where more college football players stay close to home to play than others.

The most popular colleges for Houston, Texas, where players from the same city attend, include the Houston Cougars with 20 players attending from Houston, the Texas Southern Tigers with 19 players, the Rice Owls with 13 players, and the Texas A&M Aggies, Texas Tech Red Raiders, and Houston Baptist Huskies all with 12 players.

The most popular colleges for Miami, Florida include the Florida Intl Golden Panthers with 25 players who have chosen to stay in their hometown of the capital of the Sunshine State, the Miami Hurricanes with 15 players who chose to stay, the Florida A&M Rattlers with 14 players, and the South Florida Bulls and Florida Gators, both with 13 players.

As for Jacksonville? The most popular colleges for Jacksonville, Florida football-playing residents include the Florida Atlantic Owls with 13 players, the Savannah State Tigers with 10 players, the Jacksonville Dolphins with 9 players, the Florida Gators with 8 players, and the Florida A&M Rattlers, UCF Knights, and the Florida Intl Golden Panthers with 7 college football players choosing to stay close to home.

The most popular colleges for Atlanta are the Georgia Bulldogs with 9 players, the Georgia State Panthers with 7 players, the Florida A&M Rattlers and Savannah State Tigers both with 6 players, and the Alabama A&M Bulldogs, Southern Jaguars, Hampton Pirates, and Middle Tennessee Blue Raiders all with 5 players.

Image courtesy of SBNation

International College Football Players

While many college football players are from hometowns within the U.S., we can’t forget the players not from the U.S. These players hail from all across the globe. From Canada to Australia to Puerto Rico, we were curious as to where these international college football players come from.

Three American college football players get to call Austrailia home. Alex Bland, who plays for the Oregon State Beavers is from the Land Down Under. Matt Leo, number 89 for the Iowa State Cyclones and Dominic Panazzolo, who plays for Texas Tech Red Raiders are also from Australia.

Miguel Provencio represents Mexico in the U.S. Provencio plays for the New Mexico State Aggies. Dereck Boles, who plays for the Arizona Wildcats, is from Jamaica. Withney Simon, who plays for Southern Illinois Salukis, is from Haiti. Three players come from the Bahamas. Mavin Saunders, who plays for the Florida State Seminoles, Chris Ferguson, who plays for the Cincinnati Bearcats, and Glen Bethel, number 70 for the South Florida Bulls all call the Bahamas home. Puerto Rico is home to Miami Hurricanes player Elias Lugo-Fagundo, and also home to Gerardo Rodriguez, who plays for the Stetson Hatters.

While Austalia, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico produce some college football players, the vast majority of international college football players come from Canada. Canada represents a large part of American football.

Ontario, Canada, the most populous province in Canada, is home to 32 college football players. Quebec, Canada has produced 16 players who play college football in the U.S. British Columbia can lay claim to nine American college football players. Seven players are from Nova Scotia, Canada. Five players are from Alberta, Canada, and of those five, three play for the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Two players are from the district of Manitoba, Canada. These two players both happen to play for the same team: both Brady Oliveira and Mason Bennett play for the North Dakota Fighting Hawks. Canadian player Ladji Bagayoko plays for the San Diego State Aztecs.

This makes Canada’s grand total out to be 72 college football players.

By the Numbers: Height and Weight in College Football

Since we were looking at every college player, we decided to dig a little deeper than just the hometown. Football players are known for their size, so we also considered their measurements, too. In fact, you can use the map to group and filter by weight or height ranges.

The median height of all of the college football players is 73 inches or 6’1″, which we think is pretty tall. Even taller than that is the maximum height of the college football players which is 83 inches or 6’11”. Two players reach this massive height: Justin Wright, a quarterback for the Hampton Pirates and Sherman Harris, a defensive back for the Duquesne Dukes. No one can say they beat 6’11” currently in college football, so there are no 7-footers. But 6’11” is still pretty tall.

Rudy Ruettiger, who was known for his shorter height of 5’6″ has some competition in the current crop of college football players. There are 29 players shorter than the famous Rudy: 15 running backs, seven wide receivers, six placekickers, and one defensive back. However, the current minimum height is 60 inches or a solid 5’0″, which is six inches shorter than Rudy! This height belongs to Ronald Ricci of the Florida A&M Rattlers.

The median weight of all of the 25,000 NCAA football players is 215 pounds. The largest of the group? Both Cheickna Doucoure of the Central Connecticut Blue Devils and Jamari Logan, playing for the Northern Colorado Bears come in at the maximum weight of 425 pounds. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the minimum weight, which is 130 pounds and belongs to Champ Flemings of the Oregon State Beavers.

There you have it! Now you know the details of every single college football player! Whether it’s hometown, or height and weight, discover more about your favorite college football players on the map above. And if you’re more of a professional sports fan, check out these NBA Finals Winners and Losers on a Map.