2025-09-09 18:03:35
The median salary for full-time workers in the United States was $49,500, based on estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024. However, salaries vary by occupation. These charts show the spread.
2025-09-09 01:35:40
For NYT’s the Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Francesca Paris, and Rumsey Taylor show how zodiac signs were determined by the position of constellations relative to Earth and the Sun thousands of years ago. That probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but more accurate measurements and records show that if we continued to go by the relative positions, our zodiac signs would be different.
The interactive elements and animations illustrate the shifts well. Enter your birth date to see how your sign would change, and a night sky moves to show how our perspective changes because of Earth’s wobble.
Tags: constellations, stars, Upshot, Zodiac
2025-09-08 18:59:25
NPR enlisted the band Bettis And 3rd Degree to sonify rising temperatures in New Orleans. As the temperature rises from 1980 to present, listen as the music tempo speeds up.
Between 1980 and 2000, the average annual temperature in New Orleans goes up by more than a quarter of a degree, and it may not seem like much if you’re just looking at the data in a spreadsheet, but it is significant.
And between 2000 and 2015, it jumps up again, almost a full degree warmer than the first 75 years of data. This is where things really start to pick up.
Over the last decade, the temperature increase has accelerated even more, almost two degrees Fahrenheit more than the 1980s. And many climate scientists say temperatures are increasing faster.
2025-09-06 00:21:46
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released monthly jobs data, but after the firing last month, some might be wondering how much we can trust future BLS data. For the New York Times, Ben Casselman asked economists how they’re feeling these days, who mostly said that the data can still be trusted.
In any case, Ms. Groshen and other experts said, even a commissioner with ill intentions would not be able to meddle with the data, at least not in the short run and not without anyone’s noticing. The monthly jobs report is produced on a tight schedule using a highly automated and decentralized process. Most of the data that underlies the monthly payroll figure is reported directly by companies through an electronic system that is subject to strict access limitations. The commissioner, who is the agency’s only political appointee, does not have access to the numbers until they have been made final.
“There’s not like one person in a room who can manipulate things,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “There are safeguards in place.”
No sharpies allowed.
Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York Times, uncertainty
2025-09-05 17:47:07
Jon Keegan of Beautiful Public Data highlights researchers who used lidar to estimate fire damage in Southern California.
“We said, what would be a useful product for people to have as quickly as possible, since we’re doing this a couple weeks after the end of the fires? And we thought trying to get as high of a resolution and as kind of as differencing as possible would be a good idea,” said Brigham. Her team cleaned and reformatted the older, lower-resolution data and then subtracted the newer data. The resulting visualizations reveal the scale of devastation in ways satellite imagery can’t match. Red shows lost elevation (like when a building burns), and blue shows a gain (such as tree growth or new construction).
Tags: Beautiful Public Data, Lidar, Los Angeles, wildfire
2025-09-05 00:15:14
For NYT’s the Upshot, Ethan Singer found the birth of pickleball courts in aerial photographs.
By analyzing nearly 100,000 aerial photographs, we were able to identify more than 26,000 outdoor pickleball courts made in the last seven years — a majority of them at the expense of once-exclusive tennis spaces and created since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. In total, we found more than 8,000 tennis courts that had been transformed for pickleball.
Singer used computer vision to get precise coordinates of each court. Then he compared that data against old photographs to find tennis courts taken over by pickleball.
The sliding effect for before and after photographs works well here, given the contrast between a lone tennis court and a tennis court with four pickleball boundaries drawn on top.
Tags: courts, Ethan Singer, photography, pickleball, Upshot
