Nuclear winter explained visually

Neil Halloran, known for his documentary films that lean strongly on data visualization, collaborated with RAND to explain the possibility (or lack) of a nuclear winter. In the last third of the fi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

R packages useful for sports analytics

If you’re into R and analyzing sports data, you’ll want to save this CRAN task view: This CRAN Task View contains a list of packages useful for sports analytics. Most of the packages ar… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A color tool for accessible schemes

Leonardo is an open source project from Adobe that helps you pick accessible colors. There’s a JavaScript API along with a browser tool that lets you select colors interactively. Color is a c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Behind the million

Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu, for The Washington Post, used a combination unit chart with individual icons to represent the scale and weight of the near million Covid deaths in the United States. Comp… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Statistical personality quiz matches you to fictional characters

The Open-Source Psychometrics Project, which seems to have been around for a while, provides personality quizzes as an exercise in data collection and personality education: This website has been o… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Reaching 1 million deaths

The New York Times narrated the path to one million Covid deaths in the United States. They start with one million dots, each one representing a death. As you read, the dots arrange into trends and… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Inflation based on your spending

We’ve been hearing a lot about inflation rates lately on a national scale. However, how inflation impacts you depends on what you spend your money on. Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for The New York … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

How Much Time We Spend Alone and With Others

Oftentimes what we're doing isn't so important as who we're spending our time with.Tags: age, people, time use | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Chart used as drink label

For Swee Kombucha, Bedow used a stacked chart as a food label to show the ingredient breakdowns for various beverages. The greater the area is, the more ingredient by volume there is in the drink. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Scale of one million deaths

The United States is about to reach one million confirmed Covid deaths, or already passed the mark if you consider excess deaths. There’s no way to truly feel that number, but Axios visualize… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

F1 Racing results plotted as lightning

Joey Cherdarchuk used a lightning metaphor to visualize the outcomes of races from the 2021 season. The x-axis represents how far ahead or behind the each racer is compared to the average. The y-ax… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Formula 1 car redesign

The rules around a car’s aerodynamics for Formula 1 racing changed a lot this year, which means new challenges and big shifts in team rankings. Josh Katz and Jeremy White, for The New York Ti… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Global warming bike path

The @LpzfuersKlima team have completed painting a giant representation of the Warming Stripes on the Sachsenbrücke in Leipzig, thanks to crowd funding. Already starting conversations for those usin… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Chart Tool Snob

Use the tool that works for you.Tags: tools | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Number of abortions in each state, by restriction status

The Washington Post has a set of charts showing the current status of abortion in the United States. The treemap above shows counts by state in 2017, based on estimates from the Guttmacher Institut… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Map of clinics at risk of closure

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, over 200 clinics would potentially have to close. Bloomberg mapped it, along with charts showing more than half of child-bearing people in the United States with new r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Beef and the rainforest

People like beef. To raise more cattle, companies need more land. Sometimes to get more land, companies turn to unethical methods. Terrence McCoy and Júlia Ledur for The Washington Post: By reviewi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Procedural dungeons in R

Matt Dray is developing a package in R that runs a text-based game. Part of that game requires procedural dungeons that are different each time you play. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

State policy if Roe v. Wade were overturned

If Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion policies would change in many states. From last year, Daniela Santamariña and Amber Phillips, for The Washington Post, mapped what would happen. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Scale of atoms

I’ll probably never tire of these sort of videos. It starts at human scale and then zooms in closer and closer until it gets to quarks. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Tucker Carlson word usage and patterns

Tucker Carlson hosts a nightly show viewed by millions. The New York Times analyzed the changing structure of the show and Carlson’s recurring speaking points, over a span of 1,150 episodes. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

A test for a potentially flawed study on randomness and age

In 2017, a study posited that human behavior complexity peaks at age 25 and then declines, especially after age 60. The researchers estimated complexity through people’s ability to make up ra… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Nuclear energy rebrand

Nuclear energy has bad memories linked to it, which tends to draw fear from the general public. Harry Stevens, for The Washington Post, explains why some feel the fear is unwarranted: This explanat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, April 2022 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

AI says if you’re the a**hole

There’s a subreddit where people share a story and ask if they’re the asshole. WTTDOTM and Alex Petros trained AI models based on the responses so that you can enter your own story and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Facebook doesn’t seem to fully know how its data is used internally

Lorenzo Franceschi reporting for Motherboard on a leaked Facebook document: “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can̵… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Fracture and flow of Oreo cookies

Crystal Owens, Max Fan, John Hart, and Gareth McKinley from Massachusetts Institute of Technology published their research on how the cream in an Oreo behaves when you split the sandwich, in Physic… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ How to Make Bubble Clusters in R

Represent individual counts with grouped units to make data feel less abstract.Tags: R | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Tracking the CIA to demo phone tracking

Sam Biddle and Jack Poulson for The Intercept reporting on Anomaly Six, a company that knows a lot about a lot of people through phone data: To fully impress upon its audience the immense power of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Applying sentiment analysis usefully

Sentiment analysis can be fun to apply to varying types of text, but the usefulness of the results, as Rachael Tatman argues, is often low: [T]he places where it makes sense for a data scientist or… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

How much rent increased where you live

Rent increased pretty much everywhere in the United States over the past year. Abha Bhattarai, Chris Alcantara and Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post use a map to show you by how much: National… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Changing Who We Spend Time with as We Get Older

In high school, we spend most of our days with friends and immediate family. But then we get jobs, start a family, retire, and there's a shift in who we spend our days with.Tags: people, time use | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Stuck in a Form – The Process 186

When you choose visual encodings before considering the data, you usually end up with results that aren't so great.Tags: form | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Earth Reviews

Given our love for making our opinions heard for products on the internets, Earth Reviews from Neal Agarwal extends the possibilities. Review acne, frogs, snow, gum, doors, and many other important… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Calculating win probabilities

Zack Capozzi, for USA Lacrosse Magazine, explains how he calculates win probabilities pre-game and during games. On interpretation, which could easily apply to other sports and all forecasts: But i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Agent-based modeling in JavaScript

Atomic Agents is a JavaScript library by Graham McNeill that can help simulate the interactions between people, places, and things in a two-dimensional space. Saving for later. Looks fun. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Wildfires and floods, a geographic before and after

In 2021, a large portion of North America was stuck in a heat dome with record temperatures and wildfires. Gordon Logie for Sparkgeo mapped the before-and-after of major wildfires during the year i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Scraping public data ruled legal

For TechCrunch, Zack Whittaker reporting: In its second ruling on Monday, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its original decision and found that scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Redrafting the NBA, based on past player performance

With the NBA playoffs underway, it can be fun to watch the best players and wonder what it’d be like if they were drafted earlier by a different team. For The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg did … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Tax services want your data

Taxes are due today in the U.S. (yay). Geoffrey A. Fowler for The Washington Post on the part when tax services like TurboTax and H&R Block ask for your data: What he discovered is a little-di… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R, reflects on the language

NZ Herald talked to Ross Ihaka, one of the creators of R: Today, R is depended upon around the world by analysts, data scientists and big-name companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and the New Yo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Tonga shockwave around the world

Earlier this year, an underwater volcano erupted in the island nation of Tonga. For The New York Times, Aatish Bhatia and Henry Fountain describe the effects of the eruption, which lasted for days … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

✚ Manually – The Process 185

Manually editing charts is worthwhile, despite the possibility of manually making mistakes.Tags: editing | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Comparing rich people incomes and the taxes they pay

Based on leaked IRS data for the 400 wealthiest Americans, ProPublica provides a comparison of their incomes and the lower taxes they paid between 2013 and 2018. This might be best piece so far fro… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Social Media Usage by Age

Here's the breakdown by age for American adults in 2021, based on data from the Pew Research Center.Tags: age, social media | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

When people eat dinner in Europe

This map by @loverofgeography shows the usual dinner times for countries in Europe. There’s no source listed, so I’m not sure if this is based on actual data or just anecdotal, but I th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

Jeff Bezos wealth to scale

Jeff Bezos’ wealth is difficult to understand conceptually, because the scale is just so much more than what any of us are used to. So for NYT Magazine, Mona Chalabi took a more abstract appr… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago

More gender-neutral names

Georgios Karamanis plotted the ratio of girls-to-boys over time for all the names in the Social Security Administration dataset. You can see the more gender-specific names at the edges and more gen… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 2 years ago