Peter Dodds teaches a course on complex networks, and he put together a set of tarot cards to illustrate concepts. Fun.

P.S. You can also watch the entire lecture series on YouTube.

Popular news topics change depending on where you are, as what’s important to some isn’t so important to others. Unfiltered.news from Google’s Jigsaw team shows what’s covered everywhere.

Every day, tens of thousands of publishers report the news world wide. Unfiltered News allows you to explore Google News data across all publishing languages and locations to find important global stories and perspectives that may not be covered in your location. Discover which locations report on similar topics, compare different perspectives on an issue, and track issue coverage over time.

Truth & Quantity by Gregor Hochmuth is what happens when you strip out all context from an NPR newscast and only look at the numbers.

Every day at 8am and 8pm, Truth & Quantity transcribes NPR’s hourly news update using speech recognition & natural language analysis. It then selects all plural nouns from the news script and generates two compilations: one for each month (going back to 2009) and another for various quantities, such as all instances of “7” or “100 million.”

Click on any number to get more of a sentence.

Good stuff. Find out more here.

Jellybooks is an analytics company that evaluates how people read book, in a similar fashion in how a company like Netflix evaluates how customers watch shows.
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National Geographic, in collaboration with Bestiario, looks at the improving accessibility to clean water around the world.

In 1990, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, the UN set a target to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. The world hit this goal in 2010, and as of 2015, some 90 percent of the world’s people now have access to “improved” water—water from sources such as pipes or wells that are protected from contamination, primarily fecal matter.

There’s still a lot of work to do though. In some places, such as Haiti and Mongolia, conditions worsened from a percentage perspective and about of third of the populations still don’t have access.

With election season in full swing, as far as the news is concerned at least, we get to see poll after poll in the beginning of a voting day and then reports the next day about which ones were wrong. Based on the news alone, it feels like almost every poll is just plain wrong. Maarten Lambrechts shows what’s going on here with Rock ‘n Poll. It simulates a poll and then multiple polls, showing how small differences in the numbers can seem like a lot once the voting results come in.

In 1999, the Department of Agriculture published a Natural Amenities Scale that took into account “six measures of climate, topography, and water area” to help identify desirable places to live for most people.

More recently, Christopher Ingraham for the Washington Post took a quick look at the data, and declared Red Lake County the “worst” place to live in America. That’s when it got interesting. Life in a metro area started to wear.
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Ken Doctor for Nieman Lab had a chat with Steve Duenes from the New York Times about the evolving, top-notch graphics department.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, Graphics was more of a service desk. It’s not a service desk anymore. The graphics department is really a news desk and works in parallel with the other news desks like Metro and National and International.

These days graphics are often the main part of the story, if not the entire thing.

I feel like a few years ago, media took a hard swing towards the visual, and then a little bit after took a short swing back to words. Now things seem to be balancing out. I’m curious what it looks like another twenty years from now (as I selfishly wonder if FlowingData looks anything like its current self).

Based on data from the NBA stats API and using the visual layout popularized by Kirk Goldsberry, Todd Schneider gives you BallR, made with R and Shiny.

BallR lets you select a player and season, then creates a customizable chart that shows shot patterns across the court. Additionally, it calculates aggregate statistics like field goal percentage and points per shot attempt, and compares the selected player to league averages at different areas of the court.

Fun.

The best part though is that Schneider made the code available on GitHub. See how it was done or roll your own.

Mapzen, which offers a vector tile service, made Tile Exporter, so that you can search the world and 3-D print your favorites.
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In 2008, Hurricane Ike blew just past the Houston Ship Channel, “home to the nation’s largest petrochemical complex.” Had Ike touched down on the area, the damage could’ve been far worse than it was. In a collaboration between ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, Hell and High Water shows simulated models of what the flooding might look like next time, if a hurricane is a bit stronger, if it takes a slightly different path, and perhaps most importantly, if the area constructs more protections.

Spend a bit of time with this one. It almost seems like a straightforward map at first, because it loads so quickly and runs smoothly, but there’s a lot of data displayed at once. Winds, rising waters, hurricane paths, and several simulations. The map is browsable and searchable.

More on process here. [Thanks, Scott]

Daniel Goddemeyer and Dominikus Baur grew interested in cell reception while on the New York subway:

In recent years, the MTA has started to equip select stations with WiFi and cell phone transmitters, but due to the remaining lack of connectivity in the tunnels, passengers rely on stray signals from surface transmitters to send or receive messages in between stations.

So they traveled the lines, collected data, and mapped out their results.