A Data Visualization Newsletter

As employers adapt to more flexible working arrangements and rethink how much space they need, vacancies rates for offices have jumped across the globe. A study by professors at Columbia and NYU estimates that lower tenant demand may reduce the value of offices across the U.S. by as much as $456 billion. About 10% of that would be in New York City alone.

In Mexico City, a largely informal workforce traverses the city’s streets and alleys selling goods, buying things, and offering services. These 800,000 “vendedores ambulantes” (meaning wandering merchants or peddlers) operate in a legal gray area and often face challenging financial situations. But they also occupy an important place in Mexico City’s culture.

As we approach the midterm elections next month, a number of races across the House and Senate are tight. The Economist is now projecting that Democrats have roughly an 80% chance of keeping the Senate, while Republicans are favored to take back the House. Keep tabs on key races in the coming weeks by visiting The Economist’s tracker.

Once on the brink of extinction, condors are returning to the skies of Northern California after a 130-year absence. The efforts to bring the birds back have been spearheaded by a team of scientists, the native Yurok tribe, and government agencies. Together, they aim to blend the species back into the natural landscape of the Pacific Northwest over the course of the next two decades.

With its own coastal waters depleted, China has built a global fishing operation unrivaled globally. Since 2016, Chinese ships have operated off the coast of South America virtually all day, all year, moving between the shores off Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. The Chinese efforts have prompted diplomatic and legal protests across the globe.

Imagine you’re trying to divide customers into three groups based on a few pieces of information you have about them. You might choose to use an unsupervised machine learning model for this sort of task — among the most popular of which is k-means clustering. This visual explainer breaks down the concepts behind k-means in a super digestible way.