2026-07-10 17:38:56
Care of Fox 8 in New Orleans, a baseline just below 92 degrees Fahrenheit makes a two-degree difference look like a lot. Stellar work. Bar charts do not work like this, of course. [via @tkeskinturk]
Tags: baseline, temperature
2026-07-10 02:36:13
Roberto Serrano, a Brown University economics professor, gave a take-home midterm and it seems most of the students used AI handle the work. Suspicious of cheating, Serrano required the final exam to be taken in-person. For Inside Higher Ed, Emma Whitford charted the discrepancy between high midterm marks against much lower final marks:
Education needs to figure out new ways to grade progress, and students need to figure out how to think deeply for themselves. Unless you’re student number one, in which case you may carry on.
Tags: Brown University, cheating, ethics, Inside Higher Ed, Roberto Serrano
2026-07-09 21:06:15
This is No. 396 of the Process, where we look for the right tools to make the right charts. I’m Nathan Yau. This week, a bar chart was the wrong choice.
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2026-07-09 17:41:10
Netflix shows tend to draw a lot of viewers in the first season and experience a drop-off in the second. Lucas Shaw reporting for Bloomberg:
Yet the sharp drop in viewers is a major source of concern for the company, which has been studying its data to figure out why this is happening, according to people familiar with the matter. The service is ending The Night Agent after its next season. It renewed two comedies, Running Point and The Four Seasons, even though both shows surrendered more than 50% of their audience from season one.
This is probably obvious to many Netflix subscribers.
I paused the service a few months ago after spending more time flipping through the catalog than watching. I wonder what the views will look like for the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie sequel. I suspect similar to the shows above.
Tags: Bloomberg, netflix, television
2026-07-08 18:49:30
For dumb reasons, there are people in power who like to put down immigrants. However, for most people in the United States, you don’t have to look back very far to see where we came from. For the New York Times, Albert Sun, Jeff Adelson, and Larry Buchanan mapped American ancestry:
The lines of American ancestry today are not neatly drawn, and groups overlap and spill into one another. Some people don’t answer the census questions about their origins at all. For others, it’s complicated. Descendents of enslaved people, for example, may identify themselves as African American because they are unable to trace their roots to a specific place.
Many areas have truly mixed populations, with people of several different ancestries nearly equally represented.
Based on data from the American Community Survey, the shade of each region is a mix of colors that correspond to the mix of ancestries.
Tags: ancestry, immigration, New York Times
2026-07-07 18:21:49
Throughout NBA basketball history, there are many what-ifs and fan-forced asterisks for championships won. For the Pudding, Russell Samora calculated which teams over the past 25 seasons benefited the most from opponent injuries, using a scale of least “ethical” to most.
Samora uses the traditional pile-o-heads method to visualize the number of missed games due to injury. Heads are sized by how much a player added to team wins.
As a Warriors fan, I am obligated to say that injuries are part of the game and sometimes randomness swings in your favor.
Tags: basketball, championship, injury, Pudding, Russell Samora
