The Padma River in Bangladesh is constantly shifting its 75-mile path. Joshua Stevens for the NASA Earth Observatory shows what the shifting looked like through satellite imagery, over a 30-year sp… | Continue reading
The camera on the slightly creepy arm takes a picture of the pages in the book, the software uses OpenCV to extract faces, and the faces are passed to Google Auto ML Vision comparing the faces to a… | Continue reading
Wherever more attention or the appearance of it equates to more money, there are those who try to game the system. Michael H. Keller for The New York Times examines the business of fake YouTube vie… | Continue reading
Sometimes the visualization takes care of itself. Photographer Tim Whittaker filmed sheepdogs herding thousands of sheep, and the flows one place to another are like organized randomness. | Continue reading
Popular summer songs have had a bubbly, generic feel to them the past several years, but it wasn’t always like that. Styles used to be more diverse, and things might be headed back in that di… | Continue reading
The New York Times published an election map. A lot of people did not like the map, arguing that it was an inaccurate representation. Those who did like the map argued that one must consider intent… | Continue reading
We usually visualize data on computers, because it’s where the data exists and it’s a more efficient process. But as long as you can make shapes and use colors, you can use just about a… | Continue reading
There are many mistakes you can make when you first get into visualization. Yan Holtz and Conor Healy catalog the common pitfalls as part of their project From Data to Viz. While there are a lot, k… | Continue reading
From xkcd, a blockbuster idea right here. | Continue reading
Levees are intended to prevent flooding in the areas they are built, but they change the direction and speed of flowing water, which can cause unintended flooding in areas upstream. ProPublica and … | Continue reading
Genetic algorithms are inspired by natural selection, where the system is given a set of inputs and the “best” iteration is chosen until there’s some kind of convergence to a solu… | Continue reading
Apple’s value passed $1 trillion on Thursday, and as tradition requires, we must consider the scale of such a large number. We must compare the value of Apple against the sum value of a surpr… | Continue reading
NPR used video from a thermographic camera to explain why cities tend to be hotter than their surrounding areas. Straightforward and a good complement to the video. | Continue reading
Welcome to the new members-only newsletter: The Process. In this first update, a certain data graphics expert seems to really dislike R, which prompts a look into the visualization tools we use and… | Continue reading
I’m happy to introduce an in-depth, process-focused newsletter for FlowingData members. It’s called The Process. If you’re already a member, you should receive the first issue soo… | Continue reading
As the field grows and needs develop throughout companies, specialization in data science is a natural next step. Elena Grewal, head of data science at Airbnb, describes their three main tracks and… | Continue reading
Oliver Roeder for FiveThirtyEight: FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical reco… | Continue reading
Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby for Bloomberg visualized land use for the conterminous United States using a pixel-like grid map: The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzz… | Continue reading
There’s been some disagreement about who wrote “In My Life” by The Beatles, so researchers did what any normal person does and tried to model the songs of Paul McCartney and John … | Continue reading
Maximilian Noichl visualized the relationships between philosophers from 600 B.C. to 160 B.C.: The Sociology of Philosophies is a fascinating book by Randall Collins, in which he attempts to lay ou… | Continue reading
The Chronicle of Higher Education looked for education deserts — places where people aren’t within driving range of a college or university — with a combination of Census data, sc… | Continue reading
Researchers recently published estimates for the amount of area undisturbed by humans — marine wilderness — left on the planet. Kennedy Elliot for National Geographic mapped the results… | Continue reading
When cyclists ride in that big pack during a race — the peloton — the ones that aren’t leading get to ride with a reduced wind resistance. Researchers found out the magnitude of t… | Continue reading
The Upshot returns to 2016 election results mapped at the precinct level. Because you know, we all want to experience the data as many times as we can before 2020. There’s an interesting twis… | Continue reading
When you want to focus on the magnitude of differences between low and high values, use visual cues that highlight distance. | Continue reading
Cultures have formed different stories and pieced together different constellations from the stars, even though everyone are looking at the same thing in the sky. Nadieh Bremer visualized constella… | Continue reading
Instead of looking at only the most common job in each state, I found the top five for a slightly wider view. | Continue reading
Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness for the Census Bureau compared income responses from the Current Population Survey against income tax reports. The former can be fudged, whereas the latter… | Continue reading
The logistics of being a 60-foot man must be a pain. | Continue reading
The Straits Times visualized the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a 3-D browsable network. Link colors represent type of relationship, and proximity naturally represents commonalities between charact… | Continue reading
With almost absolute certainty, every product dies a quick death once its warranty runs out. I mean it makes sense, but I never really thought about it until I had to replace all of the chirping sm… | Continue reading
Kevin Quealy and Josh Katz for The Upshot analyzed shoe and running data to see if Nike’s Vaporfly running shoes really helped marathoners achieve faster times. Accounting for a number of con… | Continue reading
Birth control is one of those topics often saved for private conversations, so people’s views are often anecdotal. Someone knows what their friend, family member, etc used, but not much else.… | Continue reading
After seeing polar charts of street orientation in major cities, Vladimir Agafonkin, an engineer at Mapbox, implemented an interactive version that lets you see directions for everywhere: Extractin… | Continue reading
Sapna Maheshwari for The New York Times on Samba TV software running on smart televisions: Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, ess… | Continue reading
Many have found Amazon’s Alexa devices to be helpful in their homes, but if you can’t physically speak, it’s a challenge to communicate with these things. So, Abhishek Singh used … | Continue reading
With Twitter cracking down, some users are experiencing bigger dips in follower count than others. Jeremy Ashkenas charted some of the drops. | Continue reading
The Rush Hour puzzle game was invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s and made its way to the United States in the 1990s. There are vehicles of varying length in a parking lot, and you have to fig… | Continue reading
Earlier this year, The New York Times investigated fake followers on Twitter showing very clearly that it was a problem. It’s hard to believe that Twitter didn’t already know about the … | Continue reading
Using OpenStreetMap data, Geoff Boeing charted the orientation distributions of major cities: Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its stree… | Continue reading
The trade war started in January of this year when the administration imposed tariffs on 18 solar panel and washing machine products. Then the United States imposed more, and countries returned the… | Continue reading
Mike Loukides, Hilary Mason, and DJ Patil published a first post in a series on data ethics on O’Reilly. We particularly need to think about the unintended consequences of our use of data. It… | Continue reading
Christian Fröschlin combined 2,800 frames of a spider building its web for this composite image. Brrrbrbr. | Continue reading
The eighth Thai boy was rescued from the flooded cave recently. Great news. The South China Morning Post has a series of graphics to explain the rescue path and strategy. | Continue reading
Things have a way of repeating themselves, and it can be useful to highlight these patterns in data. | Continue reading
In the early 1990s, the CIA published internal survey results for how people within the organization interpreted probabilistic words such as “probable” and “little chance”. … | Continue reading
Benjamin Pavard from France made a low-probability goal the other day. Seth Blanchard and Reuben Fischer-Baum for The Washington Post explain the rarity and use it as a segue into expected versus a… | Continue reading
In the early 1990s, the CIA published internal survey results for how people within the organization interpreted probabilistic words such as “probable” and “little chance”. … | Continue reading