Go Figure

Come July, my husband and I become possessed by the Tour de France. It starts innocently enough, just watching the highlights each evening on the Outdoor Life Network. Soon we're planning our own weekend bike rides around Saturday's and Sunday's live broadcasts from France. Ultimately, I end up sneaking peeks during the workday, following each sprint and breakaway on the Web through the real-time reports on velonews.com or the BBC.

We never paid much attention to the Tour until Lance Armstrong began capturing stage wins in 1999, the year he returned to bike racing after battling cancer. I was baffled by the whole idea of cycling as a team sport back then. The peloton made no more sense to me than did the polka-dot jersey. The three-week race was fun to watch, but not nearly as much as it is now that I can appreciate the strategy behind the top performances and know some of the history of the Tour.

As with baseball, the other sport I'm crazy about, fans keep track of all kinds of bicycling performance stats. Burrow into the Tour's official website, www.letour.com, and you'll find that only two cyclists from Japan have ever competed; three Italians have earned the green jersey reserved for the top sprinter; and in 1986, when Greg LeMond became the first American to win, the cyclists raced 4,094 km around France at an average speed of 37.02 km per hour. Access to such a fertile lode of data puts the current race in perspective and deepens appreciation of these amazing athletes' accomplishments.

Each July, C&EN brings its readers our own rich set of statistics: the collection of industry data we call Facts & Figures for the Chemical Industry. This year it begins on page 41. With this compilation of finance, employment, production, and trade data from the major chemical-producing countries around the world, we aim to help you put the chemical enterprise's accomplishments in perspective.

Like circumnavigating France on a bicycle, putting this annual feature together requires a massive team effort. Senior Correspondent William Storck in C&EN's Northeast News Bureau begins orchestrating the work in mid-May. To collect the data, Storck calls upon the expertise and reporting skills of Assistant Managing Editor Michael McCoy, Senior Correspondent Marc Reisch, and Associate Editor Alexander Tullo, all also in the Northeast News Bureau; Senior Correspondent Patricia Short in London; and Asia-Pacific Bureau Head Jean-François Tremblay in Hong Kong.

To get the material in the final form you see in print, Storck works closely with Assistant Managing Editor Robin Giroux and her dedicated editing and production staff: Assistant Editor Melissa Braddock, Senior Editor Janet Dodd, Senior Editor Arlene Goldberg-Gist, Associate Editor Deanna Miller, Associate Editor Stephen Trzaska, and Assistant Editor Linda Wang. C&EN's talented designers, Art Directors Nathan Becker and Robin Braverman and Associate DesignerYang Ku, lay out the pages. Staff Artist Linda Mattingly creates the charts and graphs.

Two years ago, we reorganized Facts & Figures to better reflect an increasingly globalized chemical industry. This year, we're adding a functionality to the posted feature: All of the tables can be downloaded. Users can go to www.cen-online.org/coverstory/83/8328fandftables.html and opt to view the tables in PDF (Portable Document Format) or to pull them into their own computers as Excel files. We're able to bring you this new, free feature through the efforts of C&EN Online Editor Melody Voith, Production Manager Luis Carrillo, Production Associate Wes Lindamood, and Associate Editor Rachel Pepling.

"Readers will now have access to the numbers so they can manipulate them any way they want," Storck notes. "They can copy numbers, graph them, or make comparisons between countries."

Let us know what you think of these new downloadable tables and how you are using them. For years we've brought you the facts; now it's up to you to go figure.