Nathan Yau

My many thanks to FlowingData sponsors who help keep the lights on around…

When we build models of the world, we often think of it broken…

Along the same lines as Google Flu Trends, researchers at Microsoft, Stanford and…

The General Social Survey has been running since 1972, and many questions have remain unchanged to make comparisons possible. The data from then to 2012 can now be downloaded in a variety of formats. [via]

Hackathons to put open data to use.

These days it’s relatively easy to figure out connections between people via email,…

The United States Census Bureau just released county-level commute estimates for 2011, based…

An old one from xkcd. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry,…

Who’s going to be the next pope? I know all of you are…

Cartographer Gretchen Peterson taught 70 second graders about maps. She talks about her positive experience and the kids’ excitement and makes the OSM index cards she used in the class.

The United States Census Bureau just made more data available via their API. You can now access decennial data for 1990, 2000, and 2010. The API isn’t especially advanced, but it’s a heck of a lot better than PDF tables.

By Samuel Huron and Romain Vuillemot, Visual Sedimentation is “a JavaScript library for visualizing streaming data, inspired by the process of physical sedimentation.” Be sure to check out the examples.

I’m not into video games, and my experience has been near zero since…

Andrew Leonard for Salon fears what might come of the creative process if…

ESPN profiled professional basketball gambler Bob Voulgaris. He shoots a lot of data into a predictive model for NBA games and then makes bets based on simulations. His ROI is falling.

From the Winnipeg Sun. Something isn’t right here. [via]…

Add another way to make state-level choropleth maps. Stately, a project by Intridea,…

The Stanford seminar lectures on human-computer interaction are all free to view online. They all look good, but lecture 6 on “living, breathing data” with Kim Rees from Periscopic should be of most interest.

Steven Citron-Pousty provides a thorough primer on finding and making sense of geospatial data on the Internet.