For the ongoing federal layoffs and reversals, a tracker from CNN:

CNN is tracking the evolving situation at federal offices in Washington and across the United States. Earlier this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs walked back its plans to conduct mass layoffs, so it is no longer included in the tracker below. This page will be updated as new reporting becomes available.

Sourced from a wide collection of outlets and reporting, the tracker only includes firings and not administrative leave or those who took buyouts at the fork in the road.

Focus on the audience who matters and ignore the rest who only want to see data that validates narrow views.

In soccer, a free kick can be awarded after an opponent commits a foul. The ball is still and a wall of defenders stand in between the goal and the kicker to make scoring a greater challenge. The Washington Post breaks down the differing strategies of star players Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Often, all attention fixates on a lone player standing over the ball. Few have mastered this moment — of striking a free kick with perfect execution — like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

But while the outcome is often the same — a goal of spectacular dimension — the approach, technique and execution differ substantially.

My soccer knowledge is sparse, so I learned something new. I like the flow from overview, to player, to kick, followed by video footage. It lets you appreciate each player’s intention and years of practice behind a quick action.

For ProPublica, William Turton, Christopher Bing, and Avi Asher-Schapiro report on a blueprint for a system that provides home addresses to the Department of Homeland Security.

Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.

This of course is just the beginning.

I think that most people assume that the single-entity government already has access to all of our data, like how certain social media companies know a little too much about us.

But there are barriers in between the multiple entities of government to protect individual privacy and freedoms. This is on purpose. This IRS system takes away a barrier and sets precedent for future systems of a single-entity government to surveil citizens.

Read enough children’s books with anthropomorphic animals and you might notice that some animals tend towards a gender like a male frog or a female cat. For the Pudding, Melanie Walsh, with Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee, and Jan Diehm, found out how often and why with an analysis of 300 books and a reader experiment.

To find picture books that specifically feature anthropomorphic animals, we selected any book that had “animals” as one of its top Goodreads tags; any book that was tagged as “animals” in the Children’s Book Database; or any book that GPT-4o identified as featuring animals (after being prompted with its title, author, and description). We then manually evaluated every book and every representation of animal characters (for more on how we determined “anthropomorphic” animals, see below). We excluded anthologies and collections, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The story is framed into acts and an interactive to see all the books in the dataset, which is available on GitHub.

In Jacksonville, Florida, police arrested a man because AI facial recognition classified his face as a close match to a suspect’s. The police had the wrong person.

Even though charges were dropped, it’s easy to see how a flawed probabilistic tool used by those who don’t fully understand uncertainty leads to poor results. What happens when law enforcement’s mistake is less obvious and the consequences grow more serious?
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Vaccination rates are still relatively high, but they need to be for herd immunity. For ProPublica, Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, with graphics by Lucas Waldron, highlight states that fell below the recommended threshold for measles over the past decade.

At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.

“There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates,” said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah.”

A state grid map with difference charts show decreasing rates. There is a thin margin for error.

The Washington Post reconstructed the flooding at Camp Mystic, from the perspectives of geography, rain downpour, counselors and campers trying to reach safety, and parents looking for information. This was tough to read through.

Risk estimates change by statistical model and what that model accounts for. The above map, by Connie Hanzhang Jin for NPR, shows FEMA estimates (orange and yellow lines) against estimates from risk modeling company First Street (blue gradient fill) for the flooded area at Camp Mystic. More buildings fall into range for the latter.

Unfortunately, the discrepancy between FEMA estimates and more updated models that consider rainfall and flash flooding is not new.

In a Gallup poll run last month, sentiment towards immigration spiked towards positive, especially among Republicans and Independents:

The recent jump in perceptions of immigration being a good thing is largely owed to a sharp increase among Republicans and, to a lesser extent, independents. These groups’ views have essentially rebounded to 2020 levels after souring in the intervening years.

Democrats’ belief that immigration is beneficial to the country is also up slightly, to a record-high 91%. However, this is generally consistent with their highly positive perspective on immigration over the past decade, with at least 80% calling it a good thing each year since 2016.

The internet continues to feed my compulsion to click on anything that mentions card counting.

For Bloomberg, Sonali Basak talked to hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein on card counting, as it relates to investing. It’s about measuring risk and taking advantage when odds are in your favor. I like how they casually comment that the interview and card demo is in a real casino, because Weinstein’s childhood friend happens to own the place.

To go with the piece, Dorothy Gambrell illustrated a comic verison of the interview that better appeals to my senses.

Eric Katz reporting for Government Executive:

Staffing at the National Weather Service will be a top priority for Neil Jacobs if the Senate confirms him to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nominee told members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. NWS, which has shed hundreds of employees since Trump took office through firings and separation incentives, has come under scrutiny after flooding in Central Texas this month led to the death of more than 100 people.

“If confirmed, I will ensure that staffing the Weather Service offices is a top priority,” said Jacobs, who led NOAA on an acting basis in Trump’s first term. “It’s really important for the people to be there because they have relationships with people in the local community. They’re a trusted source.”

Fire a couple thousand people from NOAA. Nominate someone to lead NOAA who prioritizes filling vacancies. This does not seem very efficient for the government.

For NPR, Jenna McLaughlin breaks down DOGE access to sensitive USDA data and potential usage to stop loans and payments.

“USDA has a lot of data that people should be very concerned about protecting for a lot of different reasons,” said one current USDA employee who requested anonymity due to ongoing fear of retaliation. “Farmers’ financial and production data should be protected at all costs, for privacy reasons and because of competition. If you got access to disaster payments, you would be able to layer a lot of data and arrive at a lot of valuable conclusions about productivity and U.S. farmland, futures markets, and commodity prices. You can hedge a lot of bets and make a lot of money if you know what’s happening with U.S. agriculture.”

If DOGE were to combine that sensitive data with other sources of government information that it has sought access to, such as Internal Revenue Service and Social Security records, it could create an incredibly detailed dossier of farmers’ and ranchers’ lives, along with their networks and the people they employ, sell to and contract with.

It should not be this easy.

The New York Times mapped an overhead view of Camp Mystic with flood-risk area near the Guadalupe River. Cabins, including those just built in 2020, fall within the yellow area.

“The river is beautiful, but you have to respect it,” Mr. Eastland told the Austin American-Statesman in 1990.

More disasters followed. In October 1998, flooding in Central Texas, including much of the Guadalupe River basin, killed 12 people and injured 4,290. In the years since, floods in the area have killed 35 more individuals, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Paying attention to the visualization minutiae adds up. This week: axis positions.

Joan Westenberg had been writing notes and storing bits for seven years in an effort towards personal knowledge management, to remember everything. She deleted it.

PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it – and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder. I stopped wondering and started processing.

I immediately thought of Funes, the Memorious by Jorge Luis Borges. The short story is about a boy who remembers everything, which makes it difficult to function in everyday life. Westenberg references The Library of Babel, another short story by Borges, which imagines an infinite library that seems like it would be useful to access infinite knowledge, but most of the books turn out to be non-sensical.

Borges wrote those stories in the 1940s, but I think there might be a metaphor in there for the present day.

The Seabed 2030 Project aims to create a complete map of the world’s ocean floor. They recently announced that they are a quarter of the way there:

On World Hydrography Day, The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project has announced that 27.3% of the world’s ocean floor has now been mapped to modern standards. The increase in data represents more than four million square kilometres of newly mapped seafloor – an area roughly equivalent to the entire Indian subcontinent.

[…]

From improving tsunami early-warning systems to guiding the installation of undersea cables and identifying biodiversity hotspots, seafloor data enables informed, real-world action.

Quanta Magazine interviewed physicist Sidney Nagel, who is known for his research in everyday occurrences and capturing the processes in images.

Some pushback came because a few people did not consider certain subjects I studied to be “serious.” Others were upset because I was emphasizing what seemed to them unscientific aspects. We could have captured the same physics without working nearly as hard as we did to perfect the photography, and this made people upset. They said, “You’re a scientist, you’re not supposed to care about things like that.” But it matters to me that you appeal to as many aspects of the human endeavor as you can.

That’s why, for me, the idea of having tenure is such a meaningful thing. Most places wouldn’t have encouraged this stuff, but Chicago has been very good to me. I mean, would you give tenure to someone who’s studying coffee stains?