For Tampa Bay Times, Tracey McManus and Eli Murray delve into the purchasing of properties Clearwater, Florida by the Church of Scientology: The Church of Scientology and companies run by its members spent $103 million over the past three years buying up vast sections of downtown Clearwater. They now own most commercial property on every block within walking distance of the waterfront, putting the secretive church firmly in control of...
Microsoft just open sourced their data exploration tool known as SandDance: For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting data using “unit visualizations.” Instead of aggregating data and showing the resulting sums as bar charts, SandDance shows every single row of a dataset (for datasets up to ~500K rows). It represents each of these rows as a mark that...
I found this fascinating chart from CNBC, which attempts to nail down the definition of a millennial. It turns out everyone defines "millennials" differently. They found 23 different definitions. Some media outlets apply different definitions in different items. I appreciate this effort a lot. The design is thoughtful. In making this chart, the designer added the following guides: The text draws attention to the definition with the shortest range of...
Hi, Data represents the real world, and visualization represents data. But sometimes data… Read More
When it comes to meaningful visualization, context is everything. Richard Brath, at the 2018 Information+ Conference, looks back on historical visualization approaches and how they might be applied today to make data graphics easier to read and use. Tags: context, Richard Brath, talk
When making a scatter plot, the two variables should not be placed arbitrarily. There is a rule governing this: the outcome variable should be shown on the vertical axis (also called y-axis), and the explanatory variable on the horizontal (or x-) axis. This chart from the archives of the Economist has this reversed: The title of the accompanying article is "Ice Cream and IQ"... In a Trifecta Checkup (link), it's...
One person's long commute is another's dream. Another person's normal might be someone else's nightmare. What counts as a long commute depends on where you live. Read More
A study found that a hospital program significantly reduced the number of hospitalizations and emergency department visits. Great. But then the researchers realized that the data was recoded incorrectly, and the program actually increased hospitalizations and emergency department visits. Not so great. They retracted their paper: The identified programming error was in a file used for preparation of the analytic data sets for statistical analysis and occurred while the variable...
FiveThirtyEight has been predicting NBA games for a few years now, based on a variant of Elo ratings, which in turn have roots in ranking chess players. But for this season, they have a new metric to predict with called RAPTOR, or Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings: NBA teams highly value floor spacing, defense and shot creation, and they place relatively little value on traditional big-man skills....
Fast-growing kelp forests can deliver biofuels, biofertilizer, animal feed additives, and even tasty, nutritious food – while sucking carbon out of the atmosphere in the process. To create this all-encompassing explainer on the benefits of seaweed, we spoke to scientific experts and reviewed all of the latest reports and research. » Check out our findings » See the data
