The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage today. NPR shows before and after the ruling for each state using their new favorite hexagon grid.

[via @onyxfish]

Thomas Suh Lauder for the Los Angeles Times provides you with a way to see how the water district near you is doing relative to the rest of the state. Look up a location. Get a report card.
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Amanda Cox from the New York Times was on the Data Stories podcast. You should listen. She talks about how she uses R, workflow at the New York Times, and some of her favorite projects.

I listened while picking up my son from daycare. I hope some of it seeps into his consciousness through osmosis.

One note. In the beginning Amanda talks a little bit about how she got started. She was a statistics graduate student getting tired of the theory side of things. Her program didn’t look at a ton of data in the first year, which led her to the New York Times, a placed aimed at practicality.

However, no surprise, it varies a lot by program. For example, the UCLA and Berkeley statistics departments get you looking at data early on. I haven’t taken a course in years and am far removed from academics, but I only imagine it’s more true with the whole data science field evolving into a real thing.

There’s the unspoken agreement between two people who walk directly towards each other. You each shift a little bit to get out of the other’s way, but some people don’t like that agreement.

New York resident Cathy O’Neil noticed a certain pattern in this collision course. So she collected data implicitly by playing chicken with people who weren’t up for shifting.
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According to estimates recently released by the United Nations, about 14 million left their home countries because of conflict or persecution. Sergio Pecanha and Tim Wallace for the New York Times mapped the migrations.
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The exhibit From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! opened last week with a hit of the start button. Michael Mandiberg wrote a script to upload the Wikipedia corpus to print-on-demand service Lulu over the course of a couple of weeks. The work comes from his larger project Print Wikipedia.
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John Nelson from IDV Solutions explains how he uses a Microsoft Excel hack to make geographic cell maps.
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As the Michael LaCour brouhaha settles into the archives of the Internet and figures itself out in the real world, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky for the Verge take a brief look at how statistics plays a role in finding scientific fraud.

Fake résumé scandals will still cripple lots of careers — and rest assured we’ll cover those stories. But relatively simple data analysis is a much more robust solution to weeding out fraud. Bring on the geeks.

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In parallel to the Google Trends release, the Google News Lab produced a video interviewing a bunch of data journalism folks about the importance of data in storytelling. It’s mostly fluffy fluffy, but there’s quite a few important people in there who produce a lot of good stuff, so kind of a fun four-minute watch.
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Google Trends used to be a place where you looked up trends for historical searches, over the span of several years. You can still do that, but they recently shifted to a focus on more current search activity. Get a list of “trending stories”, maps of where the searches occur, and the familiar time series plots that show search over time. Select a trend, and you get a page with news story links along with charts.

Pretty nifty. I’m surprised we’re only now just seeing this from Google.

Oh, and you can download data for some of the trends if you so please. Too bad it’s not for all searches.

Based on data from the CITES Trade Database, “more than 27 million animals were traded internationally in 2013 for purposes ranging from garment production to traditional Chinese medicine, trophies, and scientific testing.” This National Geographic interactive by Fathom Information Design shows the various species that were traded and to what extent.
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Leading up to the release of Super Mario Maker, which lets you create your own Mario world, Miyamoto and Tezuka talked about their own process while creating the original video game, Super Mario Bros. They drew their designs on graph paper and then handed the drawings to developers for implementation.
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I knew I had seen another automated video game thing before. Tom Murphy published work a couple of years ago on creating a computer program that learns how to play classic Nintendo games.
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Seth Bling made a bot — MarI/O — that automatically learns how to play Super Mario World. It’s based on research by Kenneth O. Stanley and Risto Miikkulainen from 2002 that uses neural networks that evolve with a genetic algorithm. MarI/O starts out really dumb, just standing in place, but after enough simulations it get smart enough to navigate the world.
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Mapping data is so much about subtleties. The little things add up to make a full map exponentially better than one that wasn’t given the proper attention. But in case you don’t have the time to earn a cartography degree or simply need a quick reference, Axis Maps wrote one you can refer to.
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