A Data Visualization Newsletter

In most professional sports, the playing surface and goal size are the same everywhere the game is played. Not when it comes to baseball fields though. As Sam Vickars shows in his first piece for The DataFace, MLB parks come in all shapes and sizes. From Fenway’s Green Monster to Marlins Park’s Bermuda Triangle, Sam has meticulously mapped the idiosyncrasies of all 30 MLB ballparks.

The Yelp Economic Average (YEA) — a relatively new economic indicator from Yelp’s data science team -- indicates that the local economy rebounded in Q1. But auto businesses continued to slump nationwide, pointing to the impact of ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber. Check out those storylines and more in the latest YEA release, featuring interactive graphics produced by The DataFace team!

Some areas of the United States may be more prone to earthquakes or wildfires, but almost all Americans have to contend with some form of natural disaster. In this piece for The Washington Post, Tim Meko has designed six beautiful maps to show where disaster is most likely to strike -- from Texas’s “Flash Flood Alley” to California’s Death Valley. And with climate change in full effect, these disasters will only get worse.

Racial and ethical diversity may be improving in fashion, but there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome. That’s the conclusion from The Pudding’s latest story, which looked at 19 years of Vogue covers to see how well different shades of women were represented. Their results suggest that, while darker skin tones have become more prevalent over time, that’s largely driven by Lupita Nyong’o’s repeated appearance on the cover.

There’s a well-known thought experiment in moral psychology called “the trolley problem”, in which subjects are asked whether they would flip a switch to send an out-of-control trolley hurdling towards one person instead of five. Pretty soon, self-driving car manufacturers may be faced with a similar ethical dilemma. While widespread adoption of self-driving cars will remove human error from the roads, it’ll also introduce situations in which machines will have to navigate thorny ethical questions.

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, is an international city with a diverse population. Among the 20 cities with the largest migrant populations, only Dubai has a higher percentage of residents from foreign origins. In this piece, Karim Douieb explores the places these foreigners come from and the neighborhoods they inhabit in Brussels.