Finding the Beatle who wrote each song using statistical models

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Relationships between philosophers over time

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Searching for education deserts

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Mapping the ocean undisturbed by humans

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Calculating wind drag in the cycling peloton

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Extremely detailed election map

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

[Members Only] How to Visualize Ranges of Data in R

When you want to focus on the magnitude of differences between low and high values, use visual cues that highlight distance. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Same stars, different constellations

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Most Common Jobs, By State

Instead of looking at only the most common job in each state, I found the top five for a slightly wider view. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

When wife earns more than husband, they report a lesser gap

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Marvel size chart

The logistics of being a 60-foot man must be a pain. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Marvel Cinematic Universe as a 3-D network

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Warranty Expiration

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Analysis: Do the shoes matter in marathon running?

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Data-centric view of birth control

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Interactive to see street orientation everywhere

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Millions of internet-connected TVs track viewing habits

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Neural networks to communicate with Alexa devices using sign language

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Twitter bot purge

With Twitter cracking down, some users are experiencing bigger dips in follower count than others. Jeremy Ashkenas charted some of the drops. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Rush Hour puzzle solver and generator

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Changing Twitter, with Statistics

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Street network orientation in major cities

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Products with tariffs in the trade war

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Doing good data science

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Composite image of a spider building its web

Christian Fröschlin combined 2,800 frames of a spider building its web for this composite image. Brrrbrbr. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Graphics explaining Thai boys rescue

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

How to Visualize Recurring Patterns

Things have a way of repeating themselves, and it can be useful to highlight these patterns in data. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

How people interpret probability through words

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Expected versus actual goals in the World Cup

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

How people interpret probability through words

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


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Immigration in the United States visualized as rings of tree trunk

Pedro M. Cruz, John Wihbey, Avni Ghael and Felipe Shibuya from Northeastern University used a tree metaphor to represent a couple centuries of immigration in the United States: Like countries, tree… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

A Diagram of All the Batteries

After an unsuccessful battery search, the natural next step was of course to look up battery sizes and chart all of them. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

All the building footprints in the United States

Microsoft released a comprehensive dataset for computer-generated building footprints in the United States. The method: We developed a method that approximates the prediction pixels into polygons m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

LeBron James legacy versus championship-winning

LeBron James decides where he takes his talents this summer, and the sports news outlets continue to review every scenario as rumors trickle in. Neil Paine and Gus Wezerek for FiveThirtyEight prese… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Why People Make Bad Charts (and What to Do When it Happens)

It’s important to consider the reasons so that we don’t overreact. Otherwise, we’re just berating, pointing, and laughing all of the time, and that’s not good for anyone. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

$16.1m in political and taxpayer spending at Trump properties

ProPublica compiled spending data from a wide range of sources to calculate the total, which is still an undercount: The vast majority of the money — at least $13.5 million, or more than 84 percent… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Kepler.gl, an open source tool for mapping large-scale data

Kepler.gl, a collaboration between Uber and Mapbox, allows for easier mapping of large-scale data. From Shan He for Uber: Showing geospatial data in a single web interface, kepler.gl helps users qu… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Check if your school district or college was investigated for civil rights violations

The U.S. Department of Education constantly investigates school districts and colleges for civil rights violations. Lena Groeger and Annie Waldman for ProPublica made the data more accessible, prov… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Same money, different counting strategies

Condé Nast Traveler got 70 people from 70 different countries to count money on camera. Many times I found myself wondering, “Why would you ever do it like that?” There’s a metaph… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

What Makes People the Most Happy

It’s in the details of 100,000 moments. I analyzed the crowd-sourced corpus to see what brought the most smiles. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

History of the word ‘data’

Sandra Rendgen describes the history of “data” the word and where it stands in present day. All through the evolution of statistics through the 19th century, data was generated by human… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Finding the best Mario Kart character, statistical speaking

Henry Hinnefeld answers the age-old debate of which Mario Kart character is best, using data as his guide. Some people swore by zippy Yoshi, others argued that big, heavy Bowser was the best option… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Visual introduction to bias in machine learning

A few years ago, Stephanie Yee and Tony Chu explained the introductory facets of machine learning. The piece stood out because it was such a good use of the scrollytelling format. Yee and Chu just … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Blockchain visually explained

I feel like I was supposed to know what blockchain is a while ago, but I’ve only had a hand-wavy explanation on hand. And it wasn’t a very good one. Reuters provides a clear and concise… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Little League baseball analytics that would change the game forever

Oh. So that’s why I was always placed in right field that one year. Little League Analytics ⚾️ pic.twitter.com/THf5FyqRF7— PetrosAndMoneyShow (@PetrosAndMoney) June 14, 2018 | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Vector paths of meaning between words and phrases

Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, explored the space between words and drew the paths to get from one word to another. The above, for example, is the p… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Math gender gap bigger in richer school districts

This is quite the scatterplot from Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy for The Upshot. The vertical axis represents by how much girls or boys are better in standardized tests; the horizontal axis r… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago

Ancient Earth globe shows where you were located 750 million years ago

In a spin on the view of ancient Earth and the shift of the continents, Ian Webster made a globe where you can enter a location and see what was in that spot millions of years ago. Not all addresse… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 6 years ago