During the Camp Mystic flooding, radio communication issues may have contributed to the death of 25 children. For the New York Times, Mike Baker, Danny Hakim, and Blacki Migliozzi report on the problems, even though the radio communication system was recently overhauled by Motorola Solutions through a $7m contract.

The nonprofit utility Lower Colorado River Authority had put in a proposal for a cheaper and more complete system, but lost the bid to Motorola. The map above, based on an NYT analysis, shows the difference in coverages between the two bidders.

The Community Geography Lab in Ohio organized a mapping project for Kent residents to map historical Census data:

This map was created working closely with South End residents, including three mapping workshops in Summer 2025 where folks could research the history of their homes and print 3D houses to add to the map. These houses were designed using the open source software program Blender to approximate the houses that were there in the decades shown on the map. Their location was estimated using Sanborn Maps, and their style is primarily identified using houses that exist today. Houses that no longer exist are signified with a generic monopoly-style house.

This seems fun. I kind of want a giant cork board and a big box of thumbtacks now.

Based on estimates from health research group KFF, Margot Sanger-Katz and Alicia Parlapiano, for NYT’s the Upshot, show how much premiums rise if there is no tax subsidy extension. It varies by location, income, and age, with monthly premiums going up by more than $1,000 dollars in some places for older folks.

Democrats want an extension now. Republicans say they’ll discuss when the government reopens. Until they can agree, the government shutdown continues.

For Bloomberg, Jarrell Dillard and Michael Sasso report on the effects of the government shutdown on federal data.

BLS collects the prices of around 80,000 items over three 10-day periods each month; most are still gathered manually in person. The agency was able to release the September CPI report on Oct. 24, more than a week later than scheduled, after recalling staff to prepare it so that the Social Security Administration could tally its annual cost-of-living adjustment.

Economists generally weren’t concerned about the quality of the September inflation report because data collection was done before the government closed. But the fate of the October report, which normally would be released on Nov. 13, is up in the air. BLS hasn’t been able to collect new price information since the shutdown began, and a White House-affiliated X account said on Oct. 24 that “there will likely NOT be an inflation release next month for the first time in history.”

It does not seem like a great idea to cut off the data supply during these uncertain times, but maybe that’s what some people want.

Todd Feathers, for Wired, reports on Alpha School, an education system for children that emphasizes software and optimizing metrics over giving a nine-year-old a snack.

But in interviews with WIRED, more than a dozen former employees, students, and parents say what they expected from Alpha School wasn’t what it delivered. Former “guides” from different campuses, many of whom requested anonymity because they fear negative consequences, say Alpha’s educational philosophy was driven by software metrics and, sometimes, Liemandt’s whims. One guide said they believed Alpha wanted to prepare students for a hypercompetitive “late capitalism, dog-eat-dog” environment. Parents like Kristine Barrios say the school impacted their children, left them with glaring gaps in their education, and is now using them to sell a story of success. “They set her up for failure,” Barrios says, and then it felt like “they punished her for failing.”

If you’re going to optimize, you better make sure you’re adjusting for the right things.

This is the good stuff for October.

Alina Birjuk collected croissants around the city:

I got a push into starting the project by getting inspired with an exhibition in ZHdK by Tulio Bühler. He made ceramic shapes from croissants he found in Zürich. That made me see how one “simple” thing can be so different. I wanted to take a closer look and give some light to croissants of Zürich. Every bakery has its own way, recipe and it’s own handwriting. So I went to as many bakeries as I could and here is what I found.

Joys in the everyday is my favorite kind of personal data collection.

NBA basketball players, most notably Terry Rozier, were arrested for illegal sports betting. Rozier allegedly told associates that he would underperform during a game that he sat out of early. The associates made outlier bets that triggered cheating detection systems. Dian Zhang and Ignacio Calderon, for USA Today, reported on the usage of statistical models:

“When you do the odds compiling, you have a predicted model for how you expect the game to go,” said Chris Rasmussen, who teaches sports integrity at the University of New Haven and has spent years investigating sports betting fraud for the World Lotteries Association.

Based on the data behind the teams and players in the game, the model expects certain points for those players and predicts “expected behaviors.” When real-world betting behavior starts to deviate from the model’s prediction, that’s when “we are starting to look,” Rasmussen explained. “Why does it deviate, and how much does it deviate, and what’s going on?”

The key is to figure out regular betting patterns and deviate within reason. Avoid the outlier stuff, because of course a concentrated set of bets for a few hundred thousand are going to trigger the systems.

These people need a data guy. Or maybe the good cheaters already have a data guy, and that’s why no one hears about them. See? Math is useful.

Science Friday had mathematician Paulina Rowińska as guest to talk maps.

It’s easy to take maps for granted. After all, most of us have a pretty good map in our pockets at all times, ready to show us how to get anywhere on the globe. But to make a map useful, you have to decide what to keep in and what to leave out—and, most importantly, which mathematical equations to use. Beyond navigating from point A to point B, math and maps come together for a wide variety of things, like working out the most efficient route to deliver packages, calculating the depth of the ocean floor, and more.

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Various shields are designed to block specific forces or mechanisms. For example, armor is good at blocking swords and shark cages are good at protecting divers from sharks. You’ve probably wondered, as most people have, how these shields work against forces they are not designed for. xkcd has a pairwise matrix for you.

As fashion changes, so do the colors used each season. Sarah Constantin likes to count the color usage every year in Vogue Magazine’s ready-to-wear collections. Pastels (and red) are so hot right now.

Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media:

Miller said that in May 2025 Wikipedia noticed unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic originating mostly from Brazil. He didn’t go into details, but explained this caused the Foundation to update its bot detections systems.

“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” he said. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”

Fewer humans reading via the site means fewer supporters and contributors to the public encyclopedia. Not good.

For those who can’t get enough of bird migrations, the Guardian shows the paths for three species: Desertas petrel, Nightingale, and Bewick’s swan. Patterns are changing with climate. On Bewick’s swans:

As Europe warms, Bewick’s swans are making much shorter journeys to ice-free wetlands and agricultural areas in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Poland – known as short-stopping. Britain has lost an estimated 43% of its Bewick’s swans in five years.

About 60 swans are carrying GPS collars on their necks. Tracking data shows that swans adjust their autumn journeys on a daily basis. On colder days, the birds travel bigger distances but if it is warm, they sometimes do not move at all.

That seems not good. At least we can appreciate the illustrations.

The federal government is stuck and noise is currently beating signal. It’s confusing. The two are usually flipped around these parts.

Declarations have been made, but there’s not enough data yet to make such judgements. Andrew Ackerman and Alyssa Fowers report for the Washington Post:

Seven months of data isn’t usually enough to pin down the true direction of inflation, which can be swayed in the short term by one-off events. Applying Trump’s method to other points in the past year shows how far actual annual inflation can stray from an annualized estimate. For example, the 12-month inflation rate in October 2024 was much lower than an annualized estimate based on seven months of data.

A difference chart, shown above, compares actual inflation (over twelve months) against an estimate based on just seven months of data. The estimate and actual are rarely the same, and the range of difference is wide enough to declare defeat, too.

But, as we know, cherrypickers are gonna cherrypick.

For the Washington Post’s Department of Data, Andrew Van Dam looks at historical home prices in cities, dating back to 1890.

We often treat buying a house in the United States as an investment that grows faster than inflation. In some cities like Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle, with relatively high house prices, this is definitely the case. In other cities, like Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, house prices mostly stuck with inflation, “no different from spaghetti or sprockets.”

While the government shutdown pauses data about the United States, other countries feel the effects. For Reuters, Leika Kihara and Howard Schneider report:

“The month-to-month data flow in the U.S. gets talked about but never is a decisive factor,” for other central banks, said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Bank of England policymaker.

But Posen said that the shutdown itself and the tumult around BLS “contributes to the general skepticism about the governance of the U.S. and the reliability of the U.S….And that is important. It eventually feeds into reserve management and currency decisions and feeds into volatility outlooks for the U.S. that were not there before.”

The good news is that if all else fails, we’ll be able to function on AI and vibes.

It’s very easy to ignore what happens before and behind-the-scenes when you enter text into a chatbot and hit enter. A response spits up instantly. However, it takes a lot of bits, energy, and people to make that happen. A cartography of generative AI by Estampa shows the groundwork.

For Governing, Jule Pattison-Gordon on how librarians are handling the slop trying to enter the public catalog.

When you get a suspicious book, “you look it up to see what else the [author] has written. And you see there’s 30 things, and none of them have any reviews, and they were all written in the last two years,” DeMeester-Lane says. Typically, AI-generated books list an author with little to no digital footprint. And while a small or lacking online presence could indicate a new author just starting out, it takes humans time to write. One book every year or so is normal; dozens of titles per year start looking quite suspicious.