With a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, Waldo Jaquith pushes forward with the U.S. Open Data Institute, an effort to link government data sources and organizations over the next year.

I’m convinced that we already have many of the right people, organizations and businesses working on open data in the United States. They just don’t know about each other. (The organization certainly won’t duplicate any of the efforts of the folks in this space.) And we have nearly all of the necessary software, but so much of it is only known within its narrow domain, despite its broad applicability. The institute will connect all of these entities, promote the work of those who are leading the way and provide supportive, nonjudgmental assistance to those who need help. We don’t have all the answers, but we know the folks who do. We want to amplify their message and connect them to new collaborators and clients.

This could be fun.

Betrand Russell: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.” Yann Pineill and Nicolas Lefaucheux demonstrate in the video above. An equation appears on the left, a diagram in the middle, and the real-life version on the right.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack attempts to disable a site or web service by sending a ton of requests from multiple sources. Essentially, the server buckles under the pressure. Sometimes this is done to silence sites that the attackers disagree with, or they might try to take advantage of business backends.

The Digital Attack Map, a collaboration between Google Ideas and Arbor Networks, shows current attacks and serves as a browser for past attacks around the world. Color and size indicate the type of attack and movement represents origins and destinations.

Looking for a job in data science, visualization, or analytics? There are openings on the board.

Research Scientist in Visual Analytics at the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin, Ireland.

Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Netflix in Los Gatos, California.

Senior Data Scientist at dunnhumby in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Senior Data Scientist at KIXEYE in San Francisco, CA.

Data Analyst at KIXEYE in San Francisco, CA.

Nice one, xkcd.

A quick animated look on the evolution of western dance music, a mixture and blend of various styles and cultures over time.

To make it easier to trace the threads of music history, we’ve created an interactive map detailing the evolution of western dance music over the last 100 years. The map shows the time and place where each of the music styles were born and which blend of genres influenced the next.

There’s a cartogram in the background and lines connect countries and styles. It reminds me of those dance step charts with the feet on them.

You’ve probably heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea is that you can name any actor and trace back to Kevin Bacon through actors who have worked together. Ben Blatt for Slate applied this idea to sports and put together an interactive that finds the number degrees between athletes. The fun part is that you can enter two athletes from different professional sports: basketball, football, and baseball.

What’s even more remarkable is that it’s possible to connect players who didn’t even play the same sport. Cross-sport athletes like Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson are exceedingly rare, and some combinations of sports are hardly seen at all. Of these 18 athletes, all but one—Bud Grant—played baseball as one of his two pro careers, proving either that the stars of the diamond are athletic enough to master other sports or that anyone athletic enough to play basketball or football can also handle baseball. Hockey is the opposite, as there has never been a pro hockey player who also played top-level basketball, football, or baseball. As a result, hockey is a closed system. But once you get off the ice, it’s possible to link every pro baseball, basketball, and football star.

I like how it only takes 18 players (well, actually probably fewer) to pull double-time to make this possible. To link Yao Ming (basketball) and Joe Montana (football), it only took six hops, with Mark Hendrickson as a link between basketball and baseball and Deion Sanders as the link between baseball and football.

Surprising? Kind of, but then again, in 2011, almost all pairs of people on Facebook could be linked with just six hops, too. The barebones interactive is still a lot of fun to play with though if you follow sports.

Reuben Fischer-Baum looks at the most popular girl names by state, over the past six decades.

Baby naming generally follows a consistent cycle: A name springs up in some region of the U.S.—”Ashley” in the South, “Emily” in the Northeast—sweeps over the country, and falls out of favor nearly as quickly. The big exception to these baby booms and busts is “Jennifer”, which absolutely dominates America for a decade-and-a-half. If you’re named Jennifer and you were born between 1970 and 1984, don’t worry! I’m sure you have a totally cool, unique middle name.

Like the trendy names and unisex names explorations, this series of maps is based on data from the Social Security Administration, which is surprisingly formatted and ready to use. If you’re looking to play around with time series data and simple state geography, the SSA site is worth a bookmark. [Thanks, John]

Peter J. Rentfrow, et al. studied personality clusters across states using data from five surveys, totaling responses from about 1.6 million people. They recently published their results in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [pdf].

There is overwhelming evidence for regional variation across the United States on a range of key political, economic, social, and health indicators. However, a substantial body of research suggests that activities in each of these domains are typically influenced by psychological variables, raising the possibility that psychological forces might be the mediating or causal factors responsible for regional variation in key indicators.

They found three main clusters, mapped above: friendly and conventional, relaxed and creative, and temperamental and uninhibited.

The maps suggest that states belong only to specific clusters, but I suspect it’s a more continuous scale. For instance, a state might be partially part of cluster 1 and 2, not really 3, as opposed to just cluster 1. Still though, it’s an interesting start. Now if only the data they used were more easily accessible.

A challenge these days with visualization is that a piece might look great on a computer monitor and then break on a tablet or phone. However, if you design your software with that in mind so that it adapts to the device it’s on — so that it’s responsive — your audience loves you more for it. Chris Amico explains how to get started in D3.js: responsive maps, charts, and legends.

It’s been continuous tracking and monitoring for the past couple of days and nights, but none of that matters now. We get to bring him home today.

Those who use the ggplot2 package in R and do everything else in Python will appreciate this Python port of the package from yhat.

Excel makes some great looking plots, but I wouldn’t be the first to say that creating charts in Excel involves a lot of manual work. Data is messy, and exploring it requires considerable effort to clean it up, transform it, and rearrange it from one format to another. R and Python make these tasks easier, allowing you to visually inspect data in several ways quickly and without tons of effort.

The preeminent graphics packages for R and Python are ggplot2 and matplotlib respectively. Both are feature-rich, well maintained, and highly capable. Now, I’ve always been a ggplot2 guy for graphics, but I’m a Python guy for everything else. As a result, I’m constantly toggling between the two languages which can become rather tedious.

Once you get the Python library installed (and its dependencies), you’ll be able to use the same layered graphics approach as the R package, with a similar syntax.

Check out this awesome new thing called MAP. It’s made of 100% sustainable material, easy to share, unbreakable, fits in your pocket, and most importantly, shares none of your information.

Pre-ordered.

James Hamblin for The Atlantic rendered the average American man based on BMI and compared him to the average man in other countries. Hamblin named the average man Todd.

Though in his face this reads lonesome, Todd does have three international guyfriends. They met at a convention for people with perfectly average bodies, where each won the award for most average body in their respective country: U.S., Japan, Netherlands, and France. The others’ BMIs, based on data from each country’s national health centers, are 23.7, 25.2, and 25.6.

I named them all Todd, actually, even though it could be confusing, because not everyone’s name is a testament to their cultural heritage.

Digital artist Lauri Vanhala animated a day of maritime traffic in the Baltic Sea.

Here’s a marine traffic and accident visualization that I created for the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission. The video was shown last week in a conference where the ministers of environment in the region of Baltic Sea and a bunch of other professionals were discussing how to protect the vulnerable and polluted sea in the future.

The background music feels cinematic but not surprising given the audience. I particularly like the highlighting and annotation sync around the one-minute mark.

See also: Britain from Above and Netherlands from Above. Oldies but goodies.

In their continued efforts to help potential home buyers find out all they can about the neighborhoods they want to live in, Trulia added median listing prices to their set of local maps. In the zoomed out view, you get prices per county, at medium zoom it’s per ZIP code, and zoomed in all the way it’s per block. You can also see sale price and sale price per square foot.

With this, supplemented by crime data, commute, schools, and natural hazards, Trulia’s maps are a required stop for home buyers.

Dan Delany took a simple look at furloughed employees due to the government shutdown. There are tickers for duration, estimated unpaid salary, and estimated food vouchers unpaid, but the main view is the interactive tree map that shows furloughed proportions by department.

Data was nicely collated into one spreadsheet from a bunch of government-released PDF files (of course), and the code for the page is available on Github. [Thanks, Dan]

Sometimes it can be a challenge to produce data graphics in vector format, which is useful for high-resolution prints. Raw, an alpha-version tool by Density Design, helps make the process smoother.

Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, Raw aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch). In this sense, it is not intended to be a full “visualization tool” like Tableau or other similar products: as the name suggests it is a sketch tool, useful for quick and preliminary data explorations as well as for generating editable visualizations.

Although still in its early stages, Raw is actually quite useable. Start with a dataset copy and pasted from your spreadsheet, select a visualization format, and then click-and-drag how you want to represent values. Modify options as you see fit and download in the format you need.