AI-generated faces as stock photos

The Generated Photos project is a work in progress to provide realistic AI-generated faces for use in things like presentations or user interface design. “Copyrights, distribution rights, and… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

History of Tetris randomizers

Tetris is a game with foundations in randomness. Pieces are distributed randomly to players and they have to figure out the best spot for each piece. That randomness though has changed over the yea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

AI-generated voice used to fake phone call and steal money

Reporting for The Washington Post, Drew Harwell describes the case of the fake voice used for bad things: Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive’s speech and dupe his … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Reddit Follow-up; Chart Like Nobody’s Looking (The Process #57)

Consider your audience. Yes. But at some point in the visualization creation process, you have to disregard all of the feature requests and design suggestions. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How well players drafted in fantasy football

For The Upshot, Kevin Quealy used a heatmap to visualize fantasy football draft picks: This variance is widest for quarterbacks, whose pick patterns are so distinct you don’t even need to read thei… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Who owns the most land in the U.S.

Bloomberg News mapped the land owned by the largest owners: The 100 largest owners of private property in the U.S., newcomers and old-timers together, have 40 million acres, or approximately 2% of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Sprawling flood waters across the Midwest and South

The New York Times mapped the slow, wide-reaching flood waters this year so far: To measure the scope of the spring floods, The New York Times analyzed satellite data from the Joint Polar Satellite… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

School diversity visualized with moving bubbles

The Washington Post visualized 13,000 school districts to show the change in diversity between 1995 and 2017. Each bubble represents a district and the size represents number of students. The bubbl… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Sleep Schedule and Age

From the teenage years to college to adulthood through retirement, sleep is all over the place at first but then converges towards consistency. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ That Time My Chart Was on the Reddit Front Page and Everyone Hated It (The Process #56)

Something I made was on the front page of Reddit. Cool. The problem: thousands of people downvoted it. Here’s what I learned. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Stacking Apple apps in the App Store

For The New York Times, Jack Nicas and Keith Collins stack up app rankings in the App Store. Apple’s apps appear to find their way to the top of searches, perhaps more often than you might ex… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Statistical uncertainty as certainty

Mark Rober, who is having a good run of science and engineering videos on YouTube, posted a short note on how he embraces statistical uncertainty: As humans we are really good at using hindsight bi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

NOAA chief scientist highlights the forecast contradiction

In regards to the press release that seemed to contradict the National Weather Service forecast, Craig N. McLean, chief scientist of NOAA: During the course of the storm, as I am sure you are aware… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

A sim to show self-driving car challenges

On the surface, driving a car might seem fairly straightforward. Follow the rules of the road, don’t crash, and watch out for others. So why not just let a computer do all of the work? The Wa… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Plastic bottles purchased in a day, Eiffel Tower for scale

Millions of plastic bottles are purchased every day around the world. What does that look like? Simon Scarr and Marco Hernandez for Reuters virtually piled the estimated number of bottles purchased… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Looking at the Amazon fires wrong

For The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha and Tim Wallace use maps to show why we need to adjust the common view of the Amazon up in flames. It’s about the fires on the fringes. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Quiet Observer

I’ve always been a quiet person who prefers to observe and slowly think things through. At Eyeo this year, I talked about how these tendencies led to FlowingData. Be sure to check out the oth… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Restless Sleep With Age, How Much and When

It seems like no matter what I do, I cannot sleep through the night. Will it ever let up? According to the data, the answer is no and it will only get worse. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Straying from the Blue-Pink Color Scheme to Represent Gender in Visualization (The Process #55)

The blue and pink color scheme for boys and girls, respectively, used to be the norm. Now, not so much. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Bird’s-eye view of D3.js

D3.js can do a lot of things, which provides valuable flexibility to construct the visualization that you want. However, that flexibility can also intimidate newcomers. Amelia Wattenberger provides… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Useful and not so useful Statistics

Hannah Fry, for The New Yorker, describes the puzzle of Statistics to analyze general patterns used to make decisions for individuals: There is so much that, on an individual level, we don’t know: … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Gallery of uncertainty visualization methods

It must be uncertainty month and nobody told me. For Scientific American, Jessica Hullman briefly describes her research in uncertainty visualization with a gallery of options from worst to best. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

What that hurricane map means

For The New York Times, Alberto Cairo and Tala Schlossberg explain the cone of uncertainty we often see in the news when a hurricane approaches. People often misinterpret the graphic: The cone grap… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Map shows long-term record of fires around the world

For the NASA Earth Observatory, | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Where salaries stretch the farthest

Salaries are higher in big cities, but it also cost to live more in such places. So, Indeed adjusted salaries for cost of living to find where you get the most for your buck: When we adjust for cos… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Resources, August 2019 Roundup (The Process #54)

Every month I collect visualization tools and resources that you can use for or improve your work. Here’s the good stuff for August 2019. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Optimizing a Pokémon team with simulation

Emily Robinson recently took up Pokémon on Nintendo Switch: I recently started playing Pokémon again – “Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee” on the Nintendo Switch to be specific. In the classic Pokémon g… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

The Most Gender-Switched Names in US History

We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch? | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Cartogram of where presidential candidates campaign

Presidential candidates campaign harder in some states more than others. National Popular Vote made cartograms for the 2012 and 2016 elections showing the states where general election candidates h… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Where and why the Amazon rainforest is on fire

For Bloomberg, Mira Rojanasakul and Tatiana Freitas discuss why the Amazon rainforest is on fire: Commodities are key drivers behind the increased pace of deforestation. An analysis of tree loss fr… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Detected fires in the Amazon rain forest, monthly

The New York Times goes with monthly small multiples to show detected fires in the Amazon rain forest. Data comes from NASA satellites Terra and Aqua. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

History of slavery in America

USA Today looks at some of the numbers on 17th century slavery in America. The format, with zooms in and out and shifts to different views, focuses both on scale and the individuals. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Chart Different, Then Adjust (The Process #53)

Practicality will make its self known whether you want to or not. So, try different visual forms and take it from there. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How much warmer your city will get

BBC News asks a straightforward question: How much warmer is your city? Enter your country and then your city. You get a time series along with projections. It reminds me of The New York Times piec… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ How to Make a Polar Density Plot in R

With cyclical data, a circular format might be useful. Combine that with a smooth density to reduce noise, and you got yourself a plot. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

People who answer “don’t know” to obvious questions

In survey data, there is usually an open-ended category for “not applicable” or “don’t know”. For Wired, Amit Katwala noticed an interesting subset of YouGov responden… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Fantasy football draft rankings, with weekly projections

Football season is starting soon, which means many will participate in the age-old tradition of the fantasy football draft. For the Washington Post, Neil Greenberg and Reuben Fischer-Baum have your… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Democratic candidates who Iowa fairgoers could name

In a “radically unscientific survey” Kevin Uhrmacher and Kevin Schaul for The Washington Post asked 59 Iowa State Fair attendees if they could name Democratic candidates. Participants c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950

The shifting majorities of the sexes in the workplace. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Measuring pop music’s falsetto usage

Vox and Matt Daniels delved into falsetto in pop music over the years. Is falsetto a big trend now compared to the rest of the history? The process of finding the answer, noisy data and all, was ju… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

✚ Annotate Charts to Help Your Data Speak, Because the Data Has No Idea What It Is Doing (The Process #52)

This week, we talk annotation and how it can make your charts more readable and easier to understand. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Predicting whether you are Democrat or Republican

The New York Times is in a quizzy mood lately. Must be all the hot weather. Sahil Chinoy shows how certain demographics tend towards Democrat or Republican, with a hook that that lets you put in yo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Everyday charts book

Add a book to the humorous-charts-documenting-the-everyday genre. Am I Overthinking This? by Michelle Rial charts the everyday. I like how Rial uses everyday objects to show everyday data informall… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Most Unliked Sandwich

Which sandwich do people not like the most? The winner: the Cheese and Tomato, if that even counts as an actual sandwich. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Warped shape of the galaxy

Dorota M. Skowron et al. made the first 3-D map of the galaxy. Sean Greene and Andrea Roberson reporting for the Los Angeles Times: Astronomers have understood since the 1950s that the galaxy is cu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Why you shouldn’t use ZIP Codes for spatial analysis

For Carto, Matt Forrest explains why you shouldn’t use ZIP codes for spatial analysis: The problem is that zip codes are not a good representation of real human behavior, and when used in dat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

How an earthquake can trigger others on the opposite side of the world

Speaking of earthquakes, Will Chase looked back at a 2012 earthquake in Sumatra that triggered not only a bunch of small ones in the vicinity, but other large ones around the world: In the ten days… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago

Earthquake trigger

For The New York Times, Derek Watkins used animated maps to show how a large earthquake can lead to thousands of small ones. Living in California, I’ve experienced a handful of these, but it … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 5 years ago