Download promo.mp4 I'm teaching about mapping again, this time featuring Protomaps , an open-source format that allows you to make zoomable maps without a subscription to a mapping service. (Play the video above for a jazzy promo!) The Protomaps system is based on serving map tiles for your basemap and data from static files — just like an image or audio file. This gives us a whole new level of…
Download mapping-promo-web.mp4 The video above is the trailer for my new online class: Mapmaking for Journalists . It starts Monday, July 11, 2022 and runs for four weeks. It's all online, and you can go at your own pace. I'll be in the class forums and even host a couple of (optional) live chats. Along the way, you'll learn how to make maps using Datawrapper , Mapbox , and Mapshaper . No prior…
Note: This post was originally published April 29, 2011, and updated in June 2020. In February 2022, I updated it again using 2020 Census data. Anyone doing population analysis by NYC police precinct might find this post helpful, especially if you're interested in race and/or ethnicity analysis by precinct. Back in 2011, I wanted to compare the racial and ethnic breakdown of low-level marijuana…
I've been both awed and terrified by the transmissibility of Omicron and the speed at which it's spread. As the case curves hockey-sticked upward and the maps all turned red, I thought it'd be interesting to visualize the spread of this new twist on the coronavirus. So the other day, while doing some work mapping Covid-19 data by US counties, I realized it wouldn't take much to generate a map for…
The last two years were rough. And as 2021 ended, and a new coronavirus surge began, the outlook wasn't exactly sunny. In an effort stay centered and battle the blues, I've turned again to my soothing practice: making things. Back in 2015, I tried to make something every week for a year . I only averaged something every 1.7 weeks, but it was still successful fun. So I'm doing it again for 2022.…
I like what's possible with triangles. Playing with rectangular blinky grids is super fun, and I've made a weather monitor and a pulse-oximeter with those. But there's something additionally awesome about the pattern possibilities with triangle pixels. So when I saw a Hackaday post about building a clock display with LED triangles, I was hooked. The short story is that I made it! It now lights up…
Keeping track of the days has been harder lately, it seems. So I was excited to see a nifty blog post by Dave Gershgorn , where he described how he built a slick dashboard by attaching a screen to a Raspberry Pi computer. In fact, the Pi actually attaches to the back of the screen, out of sight. I happen to be the kind of nerd who has a couple of Raspberry Pis around (in my case, some older Pi 3…
Maybe you've seen them: Rainbows of circles representing members of the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, or all of Congress. I wanted to make such a visualization to show the number of members of Congress who've tested positive for coronavirus and the positive tests among each party. If not for the serious nature of the topic, it was a fun puzzle to solve. The steps I took were: Figure out…
There's something exciting about holding an object you previously only imagined — whether it's a freshly baked loaf, a tomato off a garden vine, or a printed plastic pumpkin. I've had that feeling a lot lately, with a pandemic purchase of a 3D printer. Rolling an object in your fingers that was previously just a digital file on the internet is ridiculously fun. It's even more rewarding if the…
I've been interested in how voter turnout might affect the 2020 US election and I've wanted to play with Observable notebooks . So I blended the two projects, and you can play with my live Observable notebook that does those calculations. The result is an admittedly super-simplistic model of how things might turn out. But you can increase the percentage of Republican and Democratic voters…
Minneapolis police report stops and other incidents by neighborhood, so I decided to calculate the racial makeup of those neighborhoods to make some comparisons — along the lines of what I've already done for New York , Chicago , and Washington, DC . This time, though, I'm using Datasette . I've seen creator Simon Willison tweet about Datasette, and with some extra time on my hands I took a look.…
If you've got arrest or incident data from the Metropolitan Police in Washington DC, and that data is broken out by police district or public service area, you may want to compare it with the racial and ethnic makeup of the people living in those zones. If so, this post is for you. The US Census doesn't break out populations by police districts. But in DC and other large cities, census blocks…
If you're trying to match Chicago police district data with the racial and ethnic makeup of those police districts, this post is for you. The boundaries for police districts and precincts don't usually line up nicely with US census boundaries like census tracts or block groups. That makes it tough to compare incident and arrest data reported by precinct with the population of those precincts. But…
It's become a coronavirus cliché, but for this week's #MakeEveryWeek I made sourdough bread. The twist: I made one loaf in the oven and one in a slow cooker. It all started with sourdough starter, specifically this guide from Quartz colleague Tim McDonnell. This was a great project for my teens, incorporating chemistry, biology, and excellent smells. Next was this incredibly fun and detailed…
At-home pulse oximeters, those fingertip devices doctors use to measure the oxygen saturation in your blood, have been selling out everywhere thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. But as my Quartz colleague Amirta Khalid points out in this great article , most people don't need 'em. If your oxygen level is worryingly low, you'll know — you don't need a machine to tell you. Folks with some existing…
I'm incredibly lucky to be both healthy and able to work from home during this coronavirus crisis. That means I spend large chunks of my day on video calls. As a courtesy to my family, all of whom are also working and schooling from home, I've tried to warn them when they risk being broadcast to my colleagues. Now I have a fun "on air" light to help! And I've put the code online so you can make…
Buy a new aquarium, and you often get hood lights that are ... meh. They're good enough, but not great. There are plenty of high-quality replacement lights out there, but none of them had the nice, low profile of the plastic covers that came with this tank. So I decided to spruce up the existing illumination with some DYI lights — and even make them programmable with an Arduino. That was more than…
Ok, so this isn't the sexiest topic, but if you're completely stuck the way I was several times today, maybe you're happy you found this post. Today I needed to spin up a database I want available to students at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and also colleagues at Quartz. I also want to connect to the database from my home and the school using Python. Since we use Amazon's web…
Tonight I gave a presentation at Newsgeist about how I did machine learning in my pajamas — in my pajamas. I promised the gathered crowd I'd post how they, too, can make their own bike-detector, so here it goes: Follow the instructions here . When you get to the part about picking a notebook, use this one: notebooks/ee-searching-videos-with-fastai.ipynb Then follow the steps to work through the…
(Promo video for the Knight Center course .) If you're a journalist, you've probably done a story or two about about AI. But did you know you can use machine learning, too? I'll show you! While the classes below have passed, the videos and accompanying code for the Knight Center course are now available free online . Work at your own pace and enjoy. It could help with your next investigation, and…
I'm working on a new neural network that tries to predict an outcome – true or false – based on 65 different variables in a table. The tabular model I made with fast.ai is somewhat accurate at making those predictions (it's a small data set of just 5,000 rows). But to me even more interesting is determining which of the 65 features matter most. I knew calculating this "feature importance" was…
This week I kept to my summer of training plan, however the model-building I did was for a Quartz project we're not ready to share. But! I learned something super useful in the process: how to quickly turn videos into many still images. For our latest project, I'm training a model to identify specific objects available to me – much like how I trained a model to identify items in the office . The…
Off-the-shelf services like the Google Vision are trained to identify objects in general , like car , vehicle , and road in the image below. But many of the journalism projects we're encountering in the Quartz AI Studio benefit from custom-built models that identify very specific items . I recently heard Meredith Broussard call this kind of work " artisanal AI ," which cracked me up and also fits…
The brilliant Imogen Heap performed in New York a few weeks ago, and I got to experience live how she crafts sounds with her arms and hands , It was a great night of beautiful music and technology, both. One mystery I couldn't solve from the audience was how her computer detected the position of her arms. Unlike in her early videos, I didn't see something akin to a Kinect on stage. Now I think…
This summer is all about training. Yes, I'm trying to run regularly, but I'm actually talking about training machine-learning algorithms. I've been trying to learn machine learning for about three years — only to feel hopelessly overwhelmed. It was as though someone said, "With a chicken, a cow, and a field of wheat, you can make a lovely soufflé!" I took online classes, read books, and tried to…
Our family believes in paying for good journalism, so we have a few subscriptions – including the New York Times. When we signed up, we got online access along with physical papers delivered on the weekend. But we almost never read the paper version anymore, and thought it a waste. So today I went online to change my subscription to all-digital. But you can't. You must actually call the New York…
Well, "the 5 minute video" at least. Here is an Ignite talk at Newsgeist 2018 this past autumn in which I make the case for beginning repeatedly and intentionally, and even making it a practice . By the way, the AI Studio, which I ask the audience to keep secret, has since been announced !
One of my closest collaborators is a teammate far away — I'm in New York and Emily Withrow is in Chicago. We stay connected chatting on Slack . But recently Emily asked if I could regularly update my Slack status to indicate what I was doing at the moment, like coding, meeting, eating. It's the kind of thing colleagues in New York know just by glancing toward my desk. Changing my Slack status…
I'm pretty sure I purchased Civil tokens today — literally buying into an experiment to put journalism on the blockchain. After the sale, There were no tokens in my wallet and no indication my purchase was "on its way." Just a blank screen. Unsettling, but I'm not actually worried. Read more »
UPDATED at 7:45 pm ET on 9/17/2018 with new information. See the end of the post for details. It's my time to go crypto. I've followed blockchain technology, principles and trends for years without getting involved, but now have couple of reasons to get real: A new blockchain-based journalism project is about to launch, and my employer, Quartz, just launched a new cryptocurrency newsletter . It…