Home prices in the U.S. increased dramatically over the past couple of years. The percentage of home purchases by investors rather than future home owners also increased. For The Washington Post, Kevin Schaul and Jonathan O’Connell examined how much these percentages increased in major metro areas. In some places, over a third of home purchases went to investors.

For The Markup, continuing their reports on data privacy, Alfred Ng and Jon Keegan discuss the non-regulation of the location data industry:

Without government regulation, the current approach from Apple and Google is to play catch-up with data brokers for each new way that location data can be shared, experts said.

For example, while app developers could potentially lie to Apple and Google without any way to audit the companies, they face a bigger risk if they violate laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The law, which requires companies to disclose all third parties who could receive a person’s data, could be a stronger check on direct server transfers than app store scrutiny.

Connecting back to the real world is how we fill in the gaps.

The Media Manipulation Casebook summarizes how bad-intentioned people take media from past events, movies, and video games and shove the bits into a different context to fill a different purpose:

Posts with recontextualized media often take advantage of short, less than one-minute video clips that lack much context about where the video originates. One 19-second video clip posted to TikTok on February 24, 2022 depicts two paratroopers mid-flight before switching to a selfie of a man speaking in Russian. The post claimed to show troops descending on Ukraine. One of the posts of this clip received over 1 million interactions on TikTok and was shared across Instagram and Twitter. The short clip was not from 2022, but rather can be traced back to a 2015 Instagram post that had no caption, according to a fact check by Reuters.

It’s easy for anyone to grab a picture or video and claim that it shows something that it doesn’t. This is problematic during times of conflict, when accuracy is especially important. For The Washington Post, Elahe Izadi describes how journalists separate real from fake:

The process begins with geolocation: pinpointing exactly where an image was recorded on a map, which Willis calls the “the bread and butter” of verification. “We’ll never publish a clip in our blog updates or tweets if we haven’t located it,” she said.

For that, forensic journalists dissect scenes pixel-by-pixel, looking for landmarks, silhouettes and other details, and cross-referencing images using free tools such as Google Earth or the Russian equivalent, Yandex, as well as satellite subscription services. They might also compare several videos of the same incident to unlock more clues. Sometimes something as small as a tile pattern on a roof can hint at where something took place.

As a way to explore how people use questions in their writing, a straightforward tool by Clive Thompson lets you see all the questions in a body of text. Just copy and paste and you’re set. The above are the questions from George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”.

Try it out here.

See also Thompson’s related tool that shows only the punctuation.

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RealLifeLore explains the history between the two countries and the multi-faceted motivations behind the invasion. As you might expect, the reasons are complex and full of unknowns.

Correctiv is tracking sanctions against Russian individuals and companies, based on data from OpenSanctions.

If you use color as a visual encoding, you should make sure every one can actually see the differences in your scale. The cols4All package from Martijn Tennekes can help by ranking and categorizing a wide set of color schemes.

Color palettes are well organized and made consistent with each other. Moreover, they are scored on several aspects: color-blind-friendliness, the presence of intense colors (which should be avoided), the overall aesthetic harmony, and how many different hues are used. Finally, for each color palette a color for missing values is assigned, which is especially important for spatial data visualization. Currently we support three types: categorical (qualitative) palettes, sequential palettes, and diverging palettes. In the near future, more palette types will be added, such as cyclic, bivariate, and hierarchical.

Many countries have banned Russian aircraft from entering their airspace. Russian in turn has banned other countries. For Bloomberg, Mira Rojanasakul and Jin Wu mapped current bans and showed how flights have had to reroute.

As we know by now, conservatives in the U.S. are more commonly against getting vaccinated for Covid, but it wasn’t always like that. Vox shows how ideas shifted to get to where we are now.

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The 1990s elementary school aesthetic with markers and overhead projector slides works well here. The choices guide you step-by-step through the data points.

For Bloomberg, Rachael Dottle and Jackie Gu look at the current state of the fast fashion industry, which uses petroleum-derived polyester in most of the clothing:

Almost every piece of clothing we buy is made with some polyester, the data shows. Although the dataset is made up of mostly fast fashion retailers, it’s not just fast fashion that loves polyester. Lululemon joggers? Polyester, nylon and elastane. Gucci skirt? Polyester.

I like the scrapbook theme and the digital garbage falling down the screen as you read. There’s also a counter that roughly estimates the number of clothing items thrown to the trash since you started reading.

Here’s the good stuff for February.

For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz show the full distribution of expected snowfall in your area instead of just the middle:

The range can be wide. That’s because predicting snow remains tricky, especially several days out, said Alex Lamers, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service. Getting a snowfall total right requires predicting the path of a storm correctly, estimating the amount of precipitation and understanding additional factors — like the temperature high in the atmosphere, or wind speeds close to the ground — that can influence the snow’s density.

The Weather Man with Nicolas Cage is such an underrated movie.

There are many maps trying to show what is happening in Ukraine right now. Lisa Charlotte Muth is keeping a running thread.

This map by Henry Foy and Steven Bernard for Financial Times shows a timeline of Russian military presence. The gray squares represent a presence as of February 20, red diamonds represent a presence four days later, and bang symbols represent reported attacks.

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For Wired, stat professor Jeffrey Rosenthal answered statistics questions from Twitter, such as how likely it is you win the lottery, why election polls seem wrong all the time, and how statistical testing works. This was an entertaining and educational 16 minutes.

For The Pudding, Rebecca Monteleone and Jamie Brew (with design and code by Michelle McGhee) describe the advantages of more readable writing and how we measure readability. The best part is that they demonstrate with two versions of text. Switch paragraph-by-paragraph to see how an explanation is made more clear with simpler words and sentence structure.

This is what I was trying to get at with last week’s Process newsletter but much better.