educate your child interactive data viz on choosing a school and the impact that has in Chicago Meet Calumma uetzi, a rainbow-colored chameleon from Madagascar that was just named after a VCU professor “It’s one thing to have a species named after you,” he said, “but it’s another thing to have a really nice and pretty species named after you.” erinspace/sonify: Use data to create and play MIDI files! Take a CSV of data, output sound! Using Python! Small b blogging What’s going on here? I call it small b blogging. It’s a virtuous cycle of making interesting connections while also being a way to clarify and strengthen my own ideas. I’m not reaching a big audience by any measure but the direct impact and benefit is material. –what’s this look like for departments/education?

Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Motorist led police on hour-long high-speed chase because he was bored McNalley didn’t appear to be impaired by drugs or alcohol, Odegaard said. “He said he was just bored,” Odegaard said. “It looks like to us right now … he instigated this pursuit because he was bored and just wanted to do it.” The Journalist-Engineer — Medium This example is different. It’s a well-designed data dump. It’s raw numbers without any abstractions. There’s no attachment to the news cycle. There’s no traditional thesis. It cannot be made in Photoshop or Illustrator. You must write software. It represents the present-day revolution within news organizations. Some call it data journalism. Or explorable explanations. Or interactive storytelling. Whatever the label, it’s a huge shift from ledes and infographics.

Sasha Perigo on Twitter: “Today in our apocalyptic hell world: my roommate’s employer mailed her a solar panel and a personal generator to make sure she could keep working if she experiences one of the rolling blackouts.” / Twitter Corals | 3D Digitization In the future, everyone is going to be a software engineer, but only a few will learn how to code. — QuartzA new industry is emerging (pdf) to serve the Morts of the world by designing and selling what are called no-code or low-code platforms. Companies like Caspio, QuickBase, Appian, and Mendix are creating visual interfaces that enable people to essentially snap together blocks of software, and bypass the actual lines of code underlying those blocks (skilled developers can also dive into the code). With basic training, a non-technical employee can rapidly assemble software tools that solve business problems ranging from simple database queries to applications lashing together multiple legacy enterprise applications. — Yahoo pipes was so ahead of its time.