Ah, the online personality quiz, oh how I missed you. Oh wait, this one is slightly different. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth-Baker and Julia Wolfe provide a quiz used by psychologists to gauge personality traits: First, the Big Five doesn’t put people into neat personality “types,” because that’s not how personalities really work. Instead, the quiz gives you a score on five different traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, negative emotionality and openness...
Datawrapper is an online tool that helps you make nice-looking charts for the web. No code is required. Instead, a focused interface lets you load data, pick your chart type, refine, and publish. Read More
John Nelson turned the Grand Canyon inside out to understand the magnitude better: Some of my earliest memories of the place had to do with the trippy feeling of my eyes and mind trying to make sense of the scale. I had seen many mountain ranges and vistas, including some on the way, but the vast negative space played havoc with my perception of magnitude. I’ve felt it a few...
Digital assistants offer convenience, but they also offer continuous surveillance, and it’s not always clear when the tech is listening. Alias by Bjørn Karmann is a device you put on top of the assistant the block any unwanted listening: Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant...
Amanda Cox is the new data editor for The New York Times: As data editor, Amanda will continue to provide direction for The Upshot, and she’ll add the expertise from Computer-Assisted Reporting journalists in New York and software developers here and in the Washington bureau. She’ll serve as the top adviser to the executive editor and managing editor on statistical questions like polling methodologies and election forecasting, and she’ll participate...
There's a space on the basketball court called "mid-range." It's actually not off-limits. In fact, people used to shoot these so-called "mid-range" shots. Read More
People show up unannounced at John and his mother Ann’s home in South Africa, looking for stolen property, but John and Ann didn’t steal anything. For Gizmodo, Kashmir Hill investigates another case of IP address and geolocation mistaken for exactness: John and Ann’s problems weren’t necessarily caused by one bad actor, but by the interaction of a bunch of careless decisions that cascaded through a series of databases. The NGA...
Last week, I showed how the aggregate statistics, unemployment rate, masked some unusual trends in the labor market in the U.S. Despite the unemployment rate in 2018 being equal, and even a little below, that in 2000, the peak of the last tech boom, there are now significantly more people "not in the labor force," and these people are not counted in the unemployment rate statistic. The analysis focuses on...
