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.

For the Intercept, Sam Biddle reports on government plans for a one-stop shop to buy all the data.

Rather than each agency purchasing CAI individually, as has been the case until now, the “Intelligence Community Data Consortium” will provide a single convenient web-based storefront for searching and accessing this data, along with a “data marketplace” for purchasing “the best data at the best price,” faster than ever before, according to the documents. It will be designed for the 18 different federal agencies and offices that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI Intelligence Branch, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis — though one document suggests the portal will also be used by agencies not directly related to intelligence or defense.

“In practice, the Data Consortium would provide a one-stop shop for agencies to cheaply purchase access to vast amounts of Americans’ sensitive information from commercial entities, sidestepping constitutional and statutory privacy protections,” said Emile Ayoub, a lawyer with the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program.

Data privacy issues still get shoulder shrugs from most people. But it’s getting easier to see why access to such data can grow problematic when certain individuals are out to get others who have done nothing wrong. (Right??)

For The Washington Post, Douglas MacMillan and Aaron Schaffer report on a system that was in use for two years before inquiry:

Police across the country rely on facial recognition software, which uses artificial intelligence to quickly map the physical features of a face in one image and compare it to the faces in huge databases of images — usually drawn from mug shots, driver’s licenses or photos on social media — looking for possible matches. New Orleans’s use of automated facial recognition has not been previously reported and is the first known widespread effort by police in a major U.S. city to use AI to identify people in live camera feeds for the purpose of making immediate arrests, Wessler said.

It seems clear that facial recognition can be helpful in some cases. Problems arise when the systems go unchecked and everyone has to argue their innocence when out for a walk in the park.

Ukraine has suffered ongoing damage to their power infrastructure since the invasion began. Bloomberg mapped the damage through the lens of lights from above.

A Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery collected by NASA found that Kharkiv City experienced a 94% drop in the intensity of nighttime lights in the autumn of 2024 when compared to three years before Russia’s invasion. The northeast Ukrainian city’s dramatic change in satellite-detected lighting ranks third of all cities, urban areas and other communities, after Nikopol and Avdiyivka.

Bloomberg averaged pixels before and after the invasion. Be sure to click through to see the lights fade in and out as an animation.

You can download the satellite imagery data through NASA, updated daily since 2012. It amazes me every time when I’m reminded that such detailed data is openly available and easy to access.

With a circular voronoi diagram, NYT’s the Upshot shows a much slower rate of funding from the National Science Foundation, through May 21.

The full cells show the average funding over the past decade up to the same date, and the darker cells show the current funding. It looks like there are four categories with more funding than usual. Everything else is a big cut.

In case this view looks familiar, the Upshot used a similar view to show infrastructure proposals a few years ago. Although this time the circles look like petri dishes, given the topic.

Rewind back further to 2008 for the O.G. consumer spending graphic.

Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new rule that would better protect individuals’ privacy from the companies that collect and collate digital traces from wherever they can. Seemed like a good idea. But the current CFPB director Russell Vought has different ideas.

For Wired, Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on the potential harm:

Data brokers operate within a multibillion-dollar industry built on the collection and sale of detailed personal information—often without individuals’ knowledge or consent. These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. This information is frequently resold for purposes ranging from marketing to law enforcement surveillance.

Many people are unaware that data brokers even exist, let alone that their personal information is being traded. In January, the Texas Attorney General’s Office, led by attorney general Ken Paxton, accused Arity—a data broker owned by Allstate—of unlawfully collecting, using, and selling driving data from over 45 million Americans to insurance companies without their consent.

I’m sure money had nothing to do with these choices.

This week we look at how the same data can easily lead to different conclusions that can all be correct, even when they conflict.

Kirk Goldsberry plotted MVP winners in the NBA, by nationality. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander from Canada won this year, which makes that seven years in a row for international players.

I guess it’s not that surprising now that I think about it. There are a lot of international players.

More than anything, it makes me feel old, because it doesn’t seem that long ago when Stephen Curry and LeBron James were the frontrunners each year.

While we’re on maps oriented in unfamiliar ways, Robert Simmon made an upside down world map as a reminder that there is no real top or bottom on this planet. We’re just a spinning globe floating around in space.

The map is available in print. (Thanks, Zan.)

We usually think about mortality in terms of events that happened, because it’s easier to count deaths and who survived a condition after they had it. Hank Green turns attention to celebrating the deaths that did not occur and the diseases fewer people contracted because of prevention measures years prior.

In 1963, the US passed the Clean Air Act and in 1990, we passed the Clean Air Act amendments. The EPA estimates that in 2020, just the 1990 amendments saved 230,000 lives. Hundreds of thousands of people who just kept on living, who didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke or an asthma attack or a lung cancer diagnosis. They never knew they were in danger. No one knows which of the people they are. There’s no party. There’s no parade. There’s just people who aren’t dead.

Watch the full video.
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Land is sinking, or subsiding, at a slow rate of millimeters per year. For the Washington Post, Kasha Patel and Naema Ahmed report on the new research by Ohenhen, L.O., Zhai, G., Lucy, J. et al.

Researchers mapped out how land is moving vertically across the 28 most populous U.S. cities and found all the cities were compressing like a deflated air mattress to some extent. Twenty-five of them are dropping across two-thirds of their land. About 34 million people — about 10 percent of the U.S. population — live in the subsiding areas, according to the study published Thursday in Nature Cities.

It might not seem like an issue now, but when the foundation of a big building is sinking in the middle of the city, the structural integrity is probably not great.

In February, farmers sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture for removing data related to climate change. The plaintiffs argued that the data was useful for making business decisions, because the changes are real. The USDA is putting the data back.

The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige.

Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.”

Every dataset and study taken down, because it referenced keywords someone didn’t like, should come back.

Card counting is a method to keep track of the cards left in a deck while playing Blackjack. The odds nudge in your favor when there are more large numbers and face cards. Basically, you collect data at the table to forecast the next hands.

A professional card counter, who posts videos under the pseudonym Quattro, describes what it’s like in the casino.
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Speaking of maps centered on specific countries, Engaging Data made an interactive map that lets you select the country and projection to see how the view shifts.

World maps are used to show the geographic relationships between the countries and regions of the world. Their design shapes our perception of the world and those relationships. Two of the important aspects of map design are the choice of map projection and what is centered in the map. The idea for this map dataviz is to let users create their own country centered map by centering the map where you choose (on a country of your choice or a specific point) and the map projection.

This week we look at the step chart and how to highlight specific patterns in the steps.

The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Brazil’s agency for statistics and maps, released a world map that shows south on top and Brazil in the center.

This probably looks upside down and off center to most Americans, but more countries should do this.

The birthday effect is a statistical anomaly that shows higher likelihood of death on or near your birthday. For the Pudding, Russell Samora analyzes mortality data to see if this effect is for real.

The differing results across studies highlight how methodological choices—from sample selection to statistical analysis—can dramatically shape our findings. When studying something as basic as birthdays and death, how we approach the problem shapes what answers we find.

Warning: this is a statistics lesson in disguise so you might learn something.

There are plans to reduce staffing at the Social Security Administration by 7,000 and perhaps to rebuild the entire codebase, which means check delays could be a real thing. For the Urban Institute, Richard W. Johnson and Jonathan Schwabish ran the numbers for how many people could be affected if checks are just one, two, or three months late.

We find 11 percent of current Social Security beneficiaries, or 7.4 million people, do not have enough savings to replace their benefits if their Social Security checks were delayed for one month. The share with inadequate savings to replace their Social Security increases to 13 percent (8.3 million people) if checks were delayed for two months and to 14 percent (9.2 million people) if checks were delayed for three months.

For reference, SSA has never missed a benefit payment since its inception eight decades ago.