Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.
Tags: data
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The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.
Have we reached Peak Data?
Matt’s publishing a newsletter on the past, present, and future of tracking:
The last 100 years have been a journey to see how to measure ghosts - how to measure the invisible audiences at the end of technological distribution networks. With every decade, these ghosts have come more and more into focus, ending with a the last ten years of social media and digital advertising that has created unimaginable amounts of data about everything we see, read, click and like.
He sees the pendulum swinging the other way now …for those who can afford it:
If there’s one constant in the economics of audience data over the last 100 years, is that we only get free services if we pay for them with our attention. This has been true for commercial radio and television, free newspapers, mobile games and digital content. If we want privacy, we have to pay for it, and not everyone can afford this. Will the right to become a ghost only be for the people with money to buy premium products?
Medium | Stackbit
This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.
You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.
How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News
The coming GDPR storm:
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.
(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)
Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]
Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.
Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.
I feel vindicated.
People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.
This seems like a plausable explanation:
Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.
Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Structured data and Google
Bruce wonders why Google seems to prefer separate chunks of JSON-LD in web pages instead of interwoven microdata attributes:
I strongly feel that metadata that is separated from the user-visible data associated with it highly susceptible to metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. User-visible text is also developer-visible text. When devs copy/ paste that, it’s very easy to forget to copy any associated metadata that’s not interleaved, leading to errors.
Complexity Explorables
A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.
Earth day at Clearleft
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com
Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.
There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.
Atlas of Urban Expansion
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Brendan Dawes - The Art of Cybersecurity
Some lovely data visualisation by Brendan:
The work features three main components — the threats, represented by black obelisk style objects, the system which detects and deals with these threats, represented by an organic mesh like structure, and finally the creativity that is allowed to flow because the threats have been neutralised.
HTML periodical table (built with CSS grid)
This is a nifty visualisation by Hui Jing. It’s really handy to have elements categorised like this:
- Root elements
- Scripting
- Interactive elements
- Document metadata
- Edits
- Tabular data
- Grouping content
- Embedded content
- Forms
- Sections
- Text-level semantics
Sparkline Sound-Off – Chris Burnell
Chris has made sonic sparklines on his site too, but they’re far more musical than mine. Here’s his explanation of how he did it.
Tinnitus Tracker
Rob has turned his exhaustive spreadsheet of all the concerts he has attended into a beautiful website. Browse around—it’s really quite lovely!
Rob’s also writing about the making of the site over on his blog.
Table Design Patterns On The Web — Smashing Magazine
Hui Jing runs through a whole bunch of options for displaying responsive tables, some of them using just CSS, some of them using a smidgen of JavaScript. There are some really clever techniques in here.