Tracked while reading about being tracked at work

While reading this NYT article, by Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, on the drawbacks of activity and time tracking for work, the article itself tracks your reading behavior. You see counters for the … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Google Maps incorrectly pointing people to crisis pregnancy centers

Davey Alba and Jack Gillum, for Bloomberg, found that Google Maps commonly points people to crisis pregnancy centers, non-medical locations that encourage women to follow through with pregnancy, wh… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Visual explanations for machine learning

As part of a teaching initiative by Amazon, MLU-Explain is a series of interactive explainers on core machine learning concepts. Learn about training sets, decision trees, random forests, and more.… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Where the data from your car flows

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, for The Markup, identified 37 companies that collect data from connected cars. On where it goes and how the companies profit: Once a driver gets into a car, dozens of sens… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Looking for falsified images in Alzheimer’s study

Charles Piller, for Science, highlights the work of Matthew Schrag, who uses image analysis to look for falsified data, recently scrutinizing a link between a protein and Alzheimer’s: “So muc… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Edit the Chart

It just needs a little polish.Tags: editing, polish | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Serena Williams’ career rankings

Serena Williams announced her retirement from professional tennis. As is required for any milestone by a great athlete, a step chart from The New York Times shows her world ranking over time. I lik… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

EV charging road trip

We hear about electric vehicles being the future, but for that to happen, people eventually need to be able to drive long distances without getting stranded. For Bloomberg Green, Kyle Stock and Jer… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Finding illegal airstrips in Brazil

Using a combination of satellite imagery, crowdsourced databases, and analyses, The New York Times identified airstrips used for illegal mining in Brazil: To confirm these locations and connect the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Indicators for a recession

People disagree whether the United States is in a recession or not, because there isn’t a generalized formula you can just plug some numbers into. Instead, the translation of of many economic… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping extreme heat

For Bloomberg, Marie Patino reports on the shifting design choices for mapping weather extremes. The rainbow color scheme and sunny icons aren’t cutting it anymore. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Sequoia tree wildfire protection

For Reuters, Travis Hartman, Ally J. Levine, and Anurag Rao describe the measures taken to protect giant sequoia trees from wildfire. The trees have their own protections with thick bark and droppe… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping the cool spots in hot cities

As city centers heat up, people search for cooler areas. For Bloomberg Green, Laura Millan, Hayley Warren and Jeremy Scott Diamond mapped the neighborhoods for a handful of hot cities that have som… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Focus Change

A few lines and a color fill can change how others see a dataset.Tags: focus, highlight | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Amtrak train route explorer

This visual explorer by Rachel Binx lets you see Amtrak routes and stations in the United States. Click on a route. See the stations. Seeing the routes laid out like this kind of makes me want to t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

More friendships between rich and poor might mean less poverty

Recently published in Nature, research by Chetty, R., Jackson, M.O., Kuchler, T. et al. suggests that economic connectedness, or friendships between rich and poor, could improve economic mobility. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Most notable person, everywhere in the world

Who is the most famous person born in the place you live? This interactive map by Topi Tjukanov lets you answer that question for anywhere in the world. The pool of possible people comes from a cro… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Mapping how far you can travel by train in five hours, from any European station

This European travel map by Benjamin Td shows how far you can travel in five hours, given a station location. Just hover over the map, and you see the areas, or isochrones that are reachable in fiv… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Odds of winning the big Mega Millions prize

With tonight’s Mega Millions jackpot estimated at $1.28 billion, you might be wondering what the odds of winning are, even if you know the chances are super slim for an individual. (On the ot… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Data visualization(-ish) in the style of famous artists

DALL-E is an AI system from OpenAI that creates images from text. You can enter very random things and get very real-looking output. So of course someone entered “data visualization in the st… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, July 2022 Roundup

Here's the good stuff for July.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Housing displacement after disasters

Christopher Flavelle, for The New York Times, reported on the lack of support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for those who were displaced by natural disasters. Area charts by Mira Roj… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

RStudio changes name to Posit

RStudio, the company behind the IDE of the same name, are changing their name to Posit: Our charter defines our mission as the creation of free and open source software for data science, scientific… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Revisiting data science, the career

In 2012, Thomas Davenport and DJ Patil outlined a budding career choice called “data science” where people, with a combination of programming and statistics, made sense of “big… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Pizza Exchange Rate

This is a story about pizza, geometry, and making sure you get what you paid for.Tags: area, geometry, pizza | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Florence Nightingale’s use of data visualization to persuade in the 19th century

For Scientific American, RJ Andrews looks back at the visualization work of Florence Nightingale: Recognizing that few people actually read statistical tables, Nightingale and her team designed gra… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A plea to stop climate change from the guy who makes maps

For Washington Post Opinion, a struggling mapmaker makes a plea to stop climate…Tags: climate, color, humor, Washington Post | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Visualizing Delaunay Triangulation

Delaunay triangulations have applications in computer graphics, spatial analysis, and visualization. They “maximize…Tags: Delaunay, explainer, Ian Henry | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Ambiguous Units of Measurement

It's better to err on the side of obvious than leave things ambiguous.Tags: annotation, units | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Timelines for record temperatures

Speaking of the heat wave in Europe, Pierre Breteau for Le Monde charted…Tags: climate, heat, Le Monde, temperature | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Melting popsicles to visualize a heat wave

Many European countries are experience record high temperatures, so The Washington Post used…Tags: climate, heat, popsicles, Washington Post | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Database of feathers

There’s a database of feathers called Featherbase, because of course there is: Featherbase…Tags: birds, feather | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Rhythm in plant cells

Researchers are studying the electrical rhythms in plant cells. I’m not sure what…Tags: plants, rhythm | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Country-wide housing shortage

Emily Badger and Eve Washington for NYT’s The Upshot show how the housing…Tags: housing, Upshot | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Period trackers and legal implications

Given the current restrictions in the U.S., Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano, and Emma…Tags: period, privacy | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Full scope of gun deaths in the U.S.

As I’m sure you know, mass shootings, which gain attention because the scale…Tags: guns, law, mortality, Washington Post | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Empty school buses as a representation of student lives lost

The NRA Children’s Museum from Change the Ref is a mile-long convoy of…Tags: bus, guns, students | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Develop Your Judgement

While some parts of visualization are formulaic, outside variables require that you adjust.Tags: judgement, practice | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Data Visualization Humble Bundle

There’s a data visualization book bundle on Humble Bundle this month. Get twenty-two…Tags: books, Bundle | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Why the galaxy pictures from the Webb telescope are pretty cool

The first public picture from the James Webb telescope is kind of cool…Tags: NASA, Sergio Peçanha, telescope, Washington Post | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Income ladder for the children of immigrants

You’ve probably seen the moving bubbles that show how something changes over time.…Tags: immigration, income, New York Times | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A lot of galaxies

NASA released an image from the Webb First Deep Field telescope, which shows…Tags: galaxies, NASA, telescope | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Where there is more livestock than people in the United States

The United States Department of Agriculture provides annual inventory data on livestock, crops, and various products. The tool is very ad hoc government-looking, but it seems to work well enough. E… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Money distribution for streaming music

From the listener perspective, we pay our monthly or annual fees and just turn on our music streams. The path those fees take from our wallet to musicians is less straightforward. For The Pudding, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ More Literal, Less Abstract

Use visual metaphors to shorten the distance between data and what it represents.Tags: abstract, literal | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Shrinking middle-class

Income distribution continues to stretch on the high end and squish on the low end. For The New York Times, Sophie Kasakove and Robert Gebeloff look closer at what’s happening in the middle: … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Absurd trolly problems

You’ve probably heard of the trolley problem, a thought experiment that imagines a trolley approaching a fork in the tracks. There are five people stuck on one path and one person stuck on th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Imagining carbon food labels

By purchasing certain foods, we make decisions about the carbon footprint from the production of those foods. Most of us don’t have a good idea of how much difference our choices can make tho… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago