Apple, with an announcement that the world has been waiting for, released 3-D charts with the Swift Charts framework. It is available across all of their platforms. Just remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

This week we make it easier to compare multiple charts when differences are small but significant.

While there are laws in the U.S. to protect some of your privacy from direct government surveillance, agencies make use of a loophole that allows the purchase of data from brokers. For 404 Media, Joseph Cox reports on one such broker, the Airlines Reporting Corporation, that is owned by the major airlines.

The Statement of Work says that TIP can show a person’s paid intent to travel and tickets purchased through travel agencies in the U.S. and its territories. The data from the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) will provide “visibility on a subject’s or person of interest’s domestic air travel ticketing information as well as tickets acquired through travel agencies in the U.S. and its territories,” the documents say. They add this data will be “crucial” in both administrative and criminal cases.

RJ Andrews and Attila Bátorfy highlight information graphics from Signal, the Nazi propaganda magazine that ran in the early 1940s.

The magazine was the brainchild of colonel Hasso von Wedel, chief of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops. Its look was based on America’s Life magazine. Its content was significantly influenced by Paul Karl Schmidt, the press officer of the Foreign Office whose specialty was the “Jewish question”—the debate about the status and treatment of European Jews. Signal surprisingly contains almost no anti-Semitic content, perhaps because it did not want to offend intelligentsia in its target countries. Instead, it favored portraying Germany in an extremely friendly, kind, peace-loving, almost liberal light.

Beware of dishonest charts.

Annelie Berner used blooming flowers as a visual metaphor to show climate change. The piece is called Plant Futures.

Plant Futures envisions how a flower might show climate data, data that could eventually shape our familiar surroundings into something entirely new.

Looking at just one flower, what does it need to survive and how might those needs be impacted by future climates? How a flower blooms is rooted in the place in which it grows. The variance in size, petals, color, even veins can be traced to that month’s temperature, rain, storms, which is in turn traced by sensors and compiled as data.

Thus a flower represents, in and of itself, its surroundings as well as the broader climate.

I like how the flowers morph into each other, given various conditions.

Many visualization folks recognize the cholera map as a vital tool that John Snow used in the 19th century to figure out the source of the disease. Joshua Stevens explains why that wasn’t what happened, as the map was made five years after Snow’s published conclusions.

The famous map centered on Broad Street did not lead to an ‘a-ha!’ moment, nor was it the way in which Snow came about the truth behind cholera’s transmission. Simply put, the map played no role in the discovery of how cholera spread, the decline of the disease, or the removal of the Broad Street pump.

[…]

Snow did not use a map to arrive at his conclusion. Instead, he holistically assessed the symptoms of patients, how they used and consumed water, and the conditions and municipal treatment of the water supply. He described how various sources of water smelled and even tasted, the water’s clarity, and whether upon drying it left behind residue. In this way, Snow systematically formed a hypothesis and used data to support his argument. With each step, the haze and mystery gave way and the truth began to emerge.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a reduction in data collection to put together the Consumer Price Index, which is used to estimate inflation in the United States.

BLS is reducing sample in areas across the country. In April, BLS suspended CPI data collection entirely in Lincoln, NE, and Provo, UT. In June, BLS suspended collection entirely in Buffalo, NY.

Sample reduction and collection suspension affect both the commodity and services survey and the housing survey. These actions have minimal impact on the overall all-items CPI-U index, but they may increase the volatility of subnational or item-specific indexes. The number of imputed items and the response rates increased in April due to these actions. BLS makes reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort. BLS will continue to evaluate survey operations.

I am sorry, Buffalo. You no longer directly feed into the national estimates.

Budget cuts continue to force agencies to reduce their data coverage, which inevitably shifts the estimates. This seems to be an ongoing challenge across agencies, but it is growing worse.

Chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen played against 143,000 people in a single game. The crowd voted on each move, and it eventually ended in a draw.

Carlsen, 34, became the world’s top-ranked player in 2010 at 19 and has won five World Championships. He achieved the highest-ever chess rating of 2882 in 2014 and has remained the undisputed world No. 1 for more than a decade.

“Overall, ‘the world’ has played very, very sound chess from the start. Maybe not going for most enterprising options, but kind of keeping it more in vein with normal chess — which isn’t always the best strategy, but it worked out well this time,” Carlsen said in a statement Friday as Monday’s draw seemed imminent.

I hadn’t thought about the wisdom of crowds in a while. Over the years, it’s felt like the crowds have gotten a little less wisdom-y, but maybe it’s a good time to revisit. Use our powers for good.

A couple years ago, Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data, ironically for research on honesty. Gino recently lost tenure:

A Harvard professor who has written extensively about honesty was stripped of her tenure this month, a university spokesman said on Tuesday, after allegations that she had falsified data.

The scholar, Francesca Gino, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a prominent behavioral scientist, has studied how small changes can influence behavior and been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals. Among the studies in which Dr. Gino has been a co-author are, for example, one showing that counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can lead to choosing healthier food.

Hi folks. It’s Nathan. Welcome to the Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members…

There is always ample discussion about progressive tax rates in the United States. For those unfamiliar, income earned within certain ranges are taxed differently. Higher income is taxed higher. For Datawrapper, Luc Guillemot charted the rates for countries in Western Europe.

The x-axes represent income levels as a percentage of average income in each country. The y-axes represent the tax rate for the income level. The black bars show averages for the European Union. Belgium, with the steepest climb, increases taxes the most, whereas Hungary and Bulgaria use a flat rate across income levels.

For MIT Technology Review, James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart ran numbers and interviewed experts go piece together a projection for how much energy AI will use. The takeaway is that it’s impossible to know with any certainty, because companies don’t disclose what they’re building.

The Lawrence Berkeley researchers offered a blunt critique of where things stand, saying that the information disclosed by tech companies, data center operators, utility companies, and hardware manufacturers is simply not enough to make reasonable projections about the unprecedented energy demands of this future or estimate the emissions it will create. They offered ways that companies could disclose more information without violating trade secrets, such as anonymized data-sharing arrangements, but their report acknowledged that the architects of this massive surge in AI data centers have thus far not been transparent, leaving them without the tools to make a plan.

“Along with limiting the scope of this report, this lack of transparency highlights that data center growth is occurring with little consideration for how best to integrate these emergent loads with the expansion of electricity generation/transmission or for broader community development,” they wrote. The authors also noted that only two other reports of this kind have been released in the last 20 years.

Hardware for AI uses a whole lot of energy while training on data from the internets, processing queries, and hallucinating surprising solutions. Alex de Vries-Gao, from the Institute for Environmental Studies in the Netherlands, published estimates for how much energy and compared to energy demand for countries.

Over the full year of 2025, a power demand of 5.3–9.4 GW could result in 46–82 TWh of electricity consumption (again, without further production output in 2025). This is comparable to the annual electricity consumption of countries such as Switzerland, Austria, and Finland (see Figure 2; Data S1, sheet 6). As the International Energy Agency estimated that all data centers combined (excluding crypto mining) consumed 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, specialized AI hardware could already be representing 11%–20% of these figures.

There are many assumptions behind the estimates, and they could be lower or higher depending on the unknowns, but most signs appear to point to steep increases.

We should probably plan for that. It doesn’t seem like this AI train is going to slow down any time soon. (via Wired)

Downloading survey microdata from public resources can be tricky. Sometimes the documentation is sparse, the tools are outdated, or the datasets are tucked away in obscure FTP subdirectories. This is annoying when you just want to work with the data.

Analyze Survey Data for Free, maintained by Anthony Damico, aims to streamline the download process via R. From a decade ago:

Governments spend billions of dollars each year surveying their populations. If you have a computer and some energy, you should be able to unlock it for free, with transparent, open-source software, using reproducible techniques. We’re in a golden era of public government data, but almost nobody knows how to mine it with technology designed for this millennium. I can change that, so I’m gonna. Help. Use it.

The site received an update to make downloading easier across 49 public datasets. Given the data takedowns these days, now seems like a good time to make quick use of the resource.

Roger Peng and Hilary Parker started the statistics and data science podcast Not So Standard Deviations almost a decade ago. It was one of the few podcasts I kept up with while I drove my kids to school. They posted their last episode last month.

Pouring one out for NSSD.

As we enter a time when people question the usefulness of vaccines, even though there are clear benefits, Neil Halloran revisits a time when vaccines did not exist. With a mix of charts, information graphics, and photographs, Halloran tells the story of the smallpox vaccine. High mortality rate and hundreds of millions dead transformed to zero.
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The Congressional Budget Office published a report estimating effects on household income if the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill pushes through. The poor and middle class will effectively net less in income and the upper class, especially the top 0.1%, will net more. G. Elliott Morris describes it as paying more for less, which is a raw deal.

In other words, by decreasing the amount of tax revenue it gathers from the ultra-rich, decreasing the transfers it makes to the poor, and increasing its overall spending, Republicans are asking middle-income and poor families to shoulder a much larger share of the federal deficit — all while they get less from the government. They are asking you, in summary, to pay more for less.

The chart above is from CBO. It compares income for the lowest decile against the highest as a percentage. Check out Morris’s chart that shows the shift in dollars. The bars grow much taller on the high end with an absolute scale.

The good stuff from May: tools you can use, data to play with, and resources to learn from.

As the administration tries to block international students from attending Harvard University, NYT’s the Upshot charted the schools with the highest percentage of international students.

I don’t know anything about Illinois Tech, but whoa, over half of undergraduates and graduate students are from outside the U.S.

The administration is making it more difficult if not impossible for foreign students to attend college and universities in the United States. Catherine Rampell, for Washington Post Opinion, argues that doing so is increasing trade deficits when treating education as an export.

We also run a huge trade surplus in this sector, meaning that foreigners buy much more education from the United States than Americans buy from other countries. In the 2022-2023 school year, more than three times as many international students were enrolled in the United States as there were American students studying abroad. Translated to cash: Our education-services trade surplus is larger than the trade surplus in the entire completed civilian aircraft sector.

On top of that, the people who are able to study abroad are often hard-working and the brightest in their class. They provide American students with fresh perspectives.