The Best of Nathan Yau
10+ most popular Nathan Yau articles, as voted by our community.
Nathan Yau on Data Visualization
When is Dinner, By State
These are the states that eat dinner the earliest and latest, along with everyone else in between.
How Much Time We Spend Alone and With Others
Oftentimes what we’re doing isn’t so important as who we’re spending our time with.
Nathan Yau on Education
Work Cohorts
See how many people are in various work cohorts, given education, annual income, weekly hours, and commute time.
Education as an export
The administration is making it more difficult if not impossible for foreign students to attend college and universities in the United States. Catherine Rampell, for Washington Post Opinion, argues…
Nathan Yau on Math
Pizza Exchange Rate
This is a story about pizza, geometry, and making sure you get what you paid for.
Math to map the world
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 …
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
What Makes People the Most Happy
It’s in the details of 100,000 moments. I analyzed the crowd-sourced corpus to see what brought the most smiles.
Families with money in the stock market
Based on data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, 58% of families have money in the stock market, either directly or through mutual funds or retirement accounts. The percentage has been rising ov…
The Demographics of Others
I think we can all benefit from knowing a little more about others these days. This is a glimpse of how different groups live.
Famous Movie Quotes as Charts
In celebration of their 100-year anniversary, the American Film Institute selected the 100 most memorable quotes from American cinema, and a few years ago, for kicks and giggles, I put the first ei…
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It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
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- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
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Nathan Yau on Social Media
Social media app preferences of young teenagers
Pew Research published their annual report on what social media U.S. 13- to 17-year-olds are using these days. It looks like WhatsApp took some attention from Snapchat and X continued its downward …
Passed peak social media, maybe
As we descend towards slop-based social media, where the videos are fake and the people are bots, we might be rounding up our time with algorithmically generated feeds. For Financial Times, John Bu…