2025-09-06 00:21:46
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released monthly jobs data, but after the firing last month, some might be wondering how much we can trust future BLS data. For the New York Times, Ben Casselman asked economists how they’re feeling these days, who mostly said that the data can still be trusted.
In any case, Ms. Groshen and other experts said, even a commissioner with ill intentions would not be able to meddle with the data, at least not in the short run and not without anyone’s noticing. The monthly jobs report is produced on a tight schedule using a highly automated and decentralized process. Most of the data that underlies the monthly payroll figure is reported directly by companies through an electronic system that is subject to strict access limitations. The commissioner, who is the agency’s only political appointee, does not have access to the numbers until they have been made final.
“There’s not like one person in a room who can manipulate things,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “There are safeguards in place.”
No sharpies allowed.
Tags: Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York Times, uncertainty
2025-09-05 17:47:07
Jon Keegan of Beautiful Public Data highlights researchers who used lidar to estimate fire damage in Southern California.
“We said, what would be a useful product for people to have as quickly as possible, since we’re doing this a couple weeks after the end of the fires? And we thought trying to get as high of a resolution and as kind of as differencing as possible would be a good idea,” said Brigham. Her team cleaned and reformatted the older, lower-resolution data and then subtracted the newer data. The resulting visualizations reveal the scale of devastation in ways satellite imagery can’t match. Red shows lost elevation (like when a building burns), and blue shows a gain (such as tree growth or new construction).
Tags: Beautiful Public Data, Lidar, Los Angeles, wildfire
2025-09-05 00:15:14
For NYT’s the Upshot, Ethan Singer found the birth of pickleball courts in aerial photographs.
By analyzing nearly 100,000 aerial photographs, we were able to identify more than 26,000 outdoor pickleball courts made in the last seven years — a majority of them at the expense of once-exclusive tennis spaces and created since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. In total, we found more than 8,000 tennis courts that had been transformed for pickleball.
Singer used computer vision to get precise coordinates of each court. Then he compared that data against old photographs to find tennis courts taken over by pickleball.
The sliding effect for before and after photographs works well here, given the contrast between a lone tennis court and a tennis court with four pickleball boundaries drawn on top.
Tags: courts, Ethan Singer, photography, pickleball, Upshot
2025-09-04 23:08:05
Hi everybody. Nathan here. This is the Process, the member-exclusive newsletter on data and charts beyond defaults. This week is about helping people see data for what it is and avoiding poor choices.
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2025-09-04 17:21:40
NYPD arrested the wrong man, because facial recognition marked a match. Maria Cramer and Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times:
Like Mr. Williams, the culprit was Black, had a thick beard and mustache, and wore his hair in braids. Physically, the two men had little else in common. Mr. Williams was not only taller, he also weighed 230 pounds. The victim said the delivery man appeared to weigh about 160 pounds. But Mr. Williams still spent more than two days in jail in April.
“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Mr. Williams said.
It’s clear that facial recognition can be useful for finding people, but without considering outside information, officers use the tool wrong. If they cannot use the tool correctly, then they should not use the tool.
Tags: ethics, facial recognition, New York Times, police, privacy
2025-09-03 19:18:45
The New York Times estimated political bias in Grok’s models. They entered questions from an ideology survey and evaluated the chatbot’s answers over time.
By July 11, xAI’s updates had pushed its chatbot’s answers to the right for more than half the questions, particularly those about the government or the economy, the tests showed. Its answers to about a third of the questions — most of them about social issues like abortion and discrimination — had moved to the left, exposing the potential limits Mr. Musk faces in altering Grok’s behavior. Mr. Musk and his supporters have expressed frustration that Grok is too “woke,” something the billionaire said in a July post that he is “working on fixing.”
Musk continues to make “fixes” that align with his opinions. Not ideal.
Tags: bias, chatbot, Elon Musk, Grok, New York Times
