Which NBA basketball team is the greatest ever? Instead of a circular debate at the bar, Reuben Fischer-Baum and Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight used the Elo rating system to rank teams over time.
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If you read the books or watched the movies, you get the sense that Frodo and Sam walked pretty far to toss that ring in the fire. Imgur user mattsawizard compared the journey distance with some rough real-life geography. The journey was 1,350 miles, which is kind of like walking from Los Angeles, California to Austin, Texas.
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Data art is on the rise. Jacoba Urist for the Atlantic gets into the beginnings and its current prevalence.

Art is a constant march of expansion, according to Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University, whose research includes the sociology of art. Pop art incorporated comic books and ordinary soup cans. Edvard Munch’s expressionist painting, The Scream captured the anxiety and isolation of modern life. “Now there’s the digital self, the newest kid on the block and so of course, artists are there,” he explained. “Art and environment are very much in cahoots.”

A lot of good stuff and worth the read.

Although I’m not sure about the categorization of data artists in either the scientific data arena or quantified self one. I’m pretty sure it’s a much wider and continuous spectrum.

Hannah Fairfield, who does graphics at the New York Times, talks about using visualization to show specific narratives. Something more than just “here’s some data.”
Watch the talk

Computers can calculate an infinite number of colors, but our brains can only process and see so much. This is why color spaces are important in visualization. Your code might dictate different shades, but they might look the same when you look at the visual.

And it’s why Scott Sievert explored the various spaces and provides an interactive for comparing various shades.

We see that certain color spaces are constrained by device limitations (RGB, HED). We see that other color spaces emphasize the pigments (HSV) or other elements like additive/subtractive color (LUV, LAB). We see that certain color spaces play nicely with addition and perform a smooth gradient between the two colors (XYZ, RGB2 aka the method described above).

Last month, This American Life ran a story about research that asked if you could change people’s mind about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion — with just a 22-minute conversation. The research was published in Science, but Donald Green asked the publication to retract the paper recently. It seems his co-author and UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, made up a lot of data.
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Since the 1970s, NASA has used satellites to take pictures of the Earth’s surface. This is an ongoing process, so when you string together the photos and play them out like a flip book, you see dramatic changes where cities boom, bodies of water dry up, and forests disappear. This is the motivation behind Earthshots, available for viewing via USGS.
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Think of time-lapse photography, and you imagine someone sets up a camera in a single spot to take photos at set periods of time. Researchers from the University of Washington and Google tried something else.
See it in action

Force of Nature by FIELD is a running installation commissioned by Nike. It uses data fed from Kinect and sensors hooked up to a treadmill to create an experience as if you were running through a sea of particles.
Watch the video

With wearables and cheaper and advancing tech, the how part of personal data collection is fairly straightforward. So now we move into the more socially complex questions around privacy, money, and usage. Ariana Eunjung Cha for the Washington Post looks a bit closer at the quantified self.
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Here’s a straightforward animation that shows US county boundaries change between 1629 and 2000. You can also grab all the data from the Newberry Library site.
Watch video

A while back, Nate Silver and Allison McCann for FiveThirtyEight estimated age based on a person’s name using a relatively straightforward calculation. Using data from the Social Security Administration, they looked at number of people given a name in a year and crossed that with actuarial tables for annual deaths.

Randal Olson turned that into an interactive name age calculator. Punch in a name. See the median age distribution.
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As in, you data me, I data you, and they data us. Jer Thorp argues for a verbified data, because after all, it’s already in a grammatical shift with the whole big data thing. Just take it a step further already.
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Fathom provides an interactive browser for a year of earthquakes, based on data from USGS. You’ve likely seen this data before, but the interaction is quite useful and applicable to other maps.

Filters on the right let you turn layers — population density, mortality risk, and the tectonic plates lines — on and off and subset by magnitude. The timeline on the bottom lets you scrub by time with an adjustable time span.

There’s been a sudden bump in grid maps lately taking the place of state choropleths. For example, Haeyoun Park used them to show changes in state laws for gay marriage. The advantage over the choropleth is that each state gets equal visual space, and the placement still lets people find specific states and interpret geographic relationships.

The grid format is pretty much universally liked, but now we must ask what shape is best? NPR tried the grid with hexagons. Danny DeBelius explains the reasoning, and the grid map landscape may never be the same again.

But you know what? Forget all that.
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When you walk down the aisles of the grocery store, there are probably shelves of organic foods with branding that looks small, local, and healthy. It’s almost like you’re buying products direct from the farmer. But probably not. The Washington Post highlights the ownership, based on work by Phil Howard, who has looked at similar ownership networks with beer, wine, and soda in years past.
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Wyoming just passed a law that makes it illegal to collect data about the environment, if you intend to send it to a federal or state government agency.

The reason? The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death. A small organization called Western Watersheds Project (which I represent pro bono in an unrelated lawsuit) has found the bacteria in a number of streams crossing federal land in concentrations that violate water quality standards under the federal Clean Water Act. Rather than engaging in an honest public debate about the cause or extent of the problem, Wyoming prefers to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And under the new law, the state threatens anyone who would challenge that belief by producing information to the contrary with a term in jail.

Um, wut?

The intent part confuses me most. So is it okay to collect environmental data that you don’t plan on sending to a government agency? If I were in Wyoming, I’d grab the nearest water kit, collect data water data like a fiend, and send it to my local paper, news outlet, or anywhere else that could publicize high concentrations of E. coli.