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.

As we know, there are various outcomes during election season, with uncertainty in each round. The Upshot is currently using a simulation to show the expectations of tonight.

These estimates, which include states that have not yet reported all their votes, are based on several factors: Our expectations of every candidate’s performance, the voting results in other states and the demographic makeup and historical voting patterns of voters in each state. As votes come in, we expect the uncertainty around our estimates will narrow.

Nice.

I think the general assumption is that getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture has a direct effect on profits. Krisztina Szucs put together a straightforward interactive that shows this isn’t typically the case.

Each bar represents a percentage of profit for a film. Roll over a bar, and you see three highlighted ones. The first represents the percentage of profit before a nomination, the second represents percentage of profit after a nomination but before the winner announcement, and the third bar represents percentage of profit after the ceremony.

So what you’re looking for is height before the red bar and after it. For impact level, you expect the third bar to be higher or at least the same as the first, but as you can see, most movies make the bulk of their profit in the beginning regardless.

It pains me to imagine a time when Donald Drumpf earns a Republican nomination. There are a number of ways he can get there, but there are a number of ways Marco Rubio can win the nod too. The Upshot simulated the possible routes.

To figure out what it will take for Donald J. Trump — or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz — to win the Republican nomination, we built the G.O.P. presidential nomination process in code. This interactive delegate calculator uses each state’s delegate allocation rules, along with estimates of how favorable each district is for each candidate, to simulate how the race might unfold.

And if you have a different idea of what the results will be like, you can adjust the sliders for each candidate to simulate your own results.

Alyson Hurt quickly wrote some code to take screen captures of a Google Maps window periodically.

The original intention was to see the change in traffic during the January 2016 blizzard on the east coast, but this seems like it might come in handy for something else. I’m not sure for what, but I’m bookmarking it just in case.

A few years ago, Trifacta released Vega, a “visualization grammar” that lets you create charts with a JSON file. But you still have to declare a lot of things to make something standard like a bar chart. Vega-Lite, recently released by the University Washington Interactive Data Lab, lets you take advantage of Vega but with much fewer specifications.

As you might have guessed, Vega-Lite is built on top of Vega, a visualization grammar built using D3. Vega and D3 provide a lot of flexibility for custom visualization designs; however, that power comes with a cost. With Vega or D3, a basic bar chart requires dozens of lines of code and specification of low-level components such as scales and axes. In contrast, Vega-Lite is a higher-level language that simplifies the creation of common charts. In Vega-Lite, a bar chart is simply an encoding with two fields.

That sounds good to me. Gonna give it a shot.