Nathan Yau

The Brown Institute for Media Innovation has a call for magic grants for “a small team of graduate students or postgraduates who are expected to demonstrate the relevance and viability of their ideas by implementing a prototype or creating an innovative media product.” The Columbia branch is led by my adviser. Proposal submission deadline is May 3.

Jeffrey Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera talks about big data in Charlie Rose interview.

FlowingData reader Amir sent this along. In lieu of a list of coffee…

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was horrible, but there have been…

Metrico is a puzzle action game for PlayStation Vita that centers around charts…

Yelp is putting up over 200,000 reviews and offering ten $5,000 awards for students who want to make use of their data.

When you go to one of the major sites to look up the…

There’s a data scientist opening at The New York Times, probably to fill the gap left by DataKind founder Jake Porway. [via]

Deputy editor at Ars Technica Nate Anderson was curious if he could learn…

Pitch Interactive’s drone visualization spread across the Web yesterday. Wes Grubbs, the founder of the group, talked about the data on HuffPost Live.

The Natural Language Toolkit is a Python library that is commonly used to extract data from text. There’s a free, online-accessible book to learn how to use it.

Along the same lines as their NFL fan maps, Facebook had a closer…

Ph.D. students rethink the tenure track. The traditional approach is to get your degree and then look for a professor job. That’s changing though, and more people leave academia after they graduate. I think when I first got into graduate school academia was top on my list, too, but after working with my adviser and other professors, it didn’t seem like a job I’d enjoy.

Mapping Blank Spots in the Cheeseboard Maze. “IST Austria Professor Jozsef Csicsvari together with collaborators has succeeded in uncovering processes in which the formation of spatial memory is manifested in a map representation.”

It’s hard to know the impact of drone attacks as outsiders looking in,…

As the publication of Data Points nears, I’m excited to hold it in…

Math professor Jeff Bergen explains the odds of picking a perfect bracket.…

Science graphics editor Jonathan Corum of The New York Times is great at distilling complex ideas for a wide audience. He gave a talk at Tapestry a while back. He also recently put up his deleted slides.

On Kickstarter: A project that uses a visualization of pi to connect Brooklyn…