It continues to grow more difficult for federal statistical agencies to accurately measure how the United States is doing. The American Statistical Association, in collaboration with George Mason University, released a report that highlights the challenges and possible solutions:

Our bottom-line assessment is that federal statistics are at risk. Federal statistical agencies have many strengths—economic indicators, such as the inflation rate, gasoline prices, and retail sales, roll out weekly, monthly, or quarterly on time and without fail; several agencies and OMB moved rapidly to produce timely, frequent data during Covid-19 on such topics as remote work and Covid-19 effects on health; and the 2020 Census was completed during the height of the pandemic. But the agencies face increasing challenges to their ability to innovate to the extent necessary to meet the nation’s detailed information and evidence requirements in the 21st century (e.g., for data on the economic effects of investments in infrastructure or of AI on work, education, and other sectors of society). The chief statistician’s office in OMB is under- resourced for its necessary functions to coordinate and lead a decentralized statistical system.

Using science fiction films as a proxy for what we see in our future, Alvin Chang, for the Pudding, examines the shift in settings, themes, and endings over the past eight decades. Pixel art adds depth to the data, which was partially derived via ChatGPT to categorize films over the years.

I always appreciate Chang’s connections between life and data. An analysis of sci-fi movies could easily get stuck at counts and percentages, but this gives a bit more.

Reuters explores famine around the world through the lens of starving children in Gaza.

The plight of Gaza’s children is part of a bigger trend. Globally last year more than 36 million children under 5 were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely, according to the Global Report on Food Crises, a collaborative analysis of food insecurity by 16 international organizations.

The food shortage in Gaza, while particularly widespread, comes amid a broader spike in extreme hunger as conflicts around the world intensify.

The mosaic plot above is a small part of the full piece. The illustrations make it.

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler created a comprehensive view in Calculating Empires.

Calculating Empires takes Donna Haraway’s provocation literally that we need to map the “informatics of domination.” The technologies of today are the latest manifestations of a long line of entangled systems of knowledge and control. This is the purpose of our visual genealogy: to show the complex interplay of systems of power, information, and circumstance across terrain and time, in order to imagine how things could be otherwise.

To make space for your map on a small screen, maybe just cut the map in half.

Vox explains the process of designing artificial car sounds for electric vehicles to make EV rides safer. Electric vehicles are quiet, which is nice while you’re driving, but complete silence can also be a challenge, because there would be fewer auditory cues for what’s happening.

In a collaboration between NHPR and the Pudding, Jason Moon and Russell Samora break down the allegations by time and category. The descriptions of child abuse are hard to read and listen to, but the data provides a granular and affecting view into what happened at the YDC in New Hampshire.

You’ve probably noticed that the weather forecast can change a lot for predictions many days out. The amount of fluctuation changes depending on where you live. For the Washington Post, Niko Kommenda and Harry Stevens discuss why that is (hint: oceans) with a map and a searchable chart to see your city.

Estimates were compiled by the Meteorological Development Laboratory using data from the National Digital Forecast Database.

For the New York Times, Josh Holder and Lauren Leatherby show how the Conservatives lost the election from multiple angles: lost seats, historical vote share, shift of support to Reform, an easy win by Labour, and an age breakdown. It looks bad for Conservatives any way you cut the data.

Andrei Kashcha visualized major software packages as galaxies that you can fly through.

Every dot here is a package. Position of a package is determined by force based graph layout algorithm and usually clusters together packages that depend on each other.

Some packages are connected by lines. It means one package depend on another. Image above shows only very close connections. We can also see all connections, but the image becomes obscure by amount of connections.

There’s a galaxy for the R codebase.

Trevor Rainbolt is really good at geolocating a place given a single frame from Google Streetview. He used to only stream from his desk, but he’s exploring the physical world now. For the New York Times, Tomas Weber profiles Rainbolt’s expanded point of view.

Rainbolt’s most banal moments are now served with little tinctures of epiphany and recognition. It turns out that touching Thai grass for the first time is infinitely more thrilling if you’ve obsessed over its texture and hue on your computer: It’s the excitement of a face-to-face meeting with a longtime correspondent, a first date with an old crush. Rainbolt has used the internet’s cartography to turn up the world’s intensity, fusing the virtual with the real to make both more pleasurable. “Depression can’t be real if there’s mountains,” he said last July, in a video announcing that he would soon be summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. His route: a trail that a Google Street View camera ascended 10 years earlier.

The data informs the journey.

See also: Address is Approximate, a stop motion adventure.

Last week marked 17 years running this small corner of the internet on data visualization. Thank you to FlowingData members, past and present. Thanks for reading. This site doesn’t exist without any of you.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it’s also hard to remember when I wasn’t working on FlowingData.

While writing the second edition of Visualize This, I was reminded of how visualization changed over the years. Different tools, different devices, and different datasets. I think about data and visualization differently after more years of making charts.

The scope of visualization is different. It has expanded for the better, beyond quick analysis.

The internet is different. To end FlowingData’s second anniversary, I thanked readers for sending me links via Twitter, Digg, and del.icio.us, which are far from their original forms these days.

Still, working on this site is fun for me. I still enjoy exploring data. Maybe more so than when I was getting started. I still get a kick out of how people creatively process data. I still thank the internet gods that I get do this.

Thanks again.

On to the next year.

In a different take on showing the scale of very tiny things, Epic Spaceman starts at human size and shrinks down ten times every 21 seconds.

The ages of American presidential candidates are old when compared to the ages of world leaders. Some of that is related to the age of the populations the leaders serve but not a lot. For the Washington Post, Ruby Mellen, Kevin Crowe, and Artur Galocha charted the gaps for all countries.

It’s impossible to know the exact number of Covid deaths worldwide, because consistent records aren’t kept by everyone and everywhere. So researchers have to estimate. Howtown explains the various estimation methods in the video below.

Here is the good stuff for the month.