Alas, we've released another episode of our podcast, Especially Big Data. The episode, Let's Hear it for the Girls, dives into the many factors contributing to the dearth of women in tech-- most of which are not captured in numbers.

Last week we launched a project with ProPublica that investigated the hundreds of innocent people in Houston, Texas, who have been wrongfully convicted for drug crimes since 2003. You can gain some background on the piece, "Busted," in Elaine's recent blog post. Like most of our projects, though, much of the story lives in the details.

We're excited to announce the latest installment of the Robin Hood Poverty Tracker. About two years ago, we worked with teams at Robin Hood and the Columbia Population Research Center to create a visualization that outlined the complexities of poverty and hardship in New York City. Now, two years later, we're able to show how the population of New Yorkers experiencing financial disadvantage has changed over time. While many think of poverty as a persistent state of being, the latest visualization shows how New Yorkers of every age, race, gender, and education level move in and out of financial hardship.

Hundreds of millions of women worldwide lack the freedom or the means to decide if, when, or how often they'll have children. In the United States alone, 4.72 million married women want to stop or delay having kids, but don't have birth control. Our most recent visualization for No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project explores where married women lack the means to plan the number or timing of their children. In the policy world, the issue is described as the "unmet need for family planning," but you can think of it as the disconnect between a woman's reproductive intentions and her contraceptive behavior.

We're excited to announce the release of the second episode of Especially Big Data, our new podcast. The episode, Oh, the places we go, explores the great lengths people travel to collect a single data point, and the many issues they encounter along the way. From the door-to-door surveys of the U.S. Census, to the mountain treks of community health workers, and then to NASA satellites hovering 650 km above the earth, tune in to hear some exciting tales from the trails.

To celebrate International Women's Day, we created a video for No Ceilings that demonstrates how achieving gender parity is critical to accomplishing the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs). In 2015, 193 countries around the world created a global agenda—outlined by the SDGs—intended to reduce poverty, increase shared prosperity, and protect the planet, among a series of other objectives. No Ceilings is a data-driven platform we built in collaboration with the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation to measure the progress and setbacks of girls and women worldwide. Given the similar objectives of the SDGs and No Ceilings, we were both humbled and excited to create the video.

We're pleased to announce the launch of our new podcast: Especially Big Data. While it deals with data both big and small, the podcast explores the many subjects data can document-- which can include everything from what you ate for breakfast this morning to the variability of global ocean currents. In other words, people collect data to track almost everything these days; and we're here to tell you everything it can explain, while also shedding light on everything it leaves out.

A few weeks ago, we released No Ceilings 2.0 in conjunction with the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting. Along with refurbishing the design on the landing page, we created a new visualization optimized for an installation setting. The visualization measures the change—or lack thereof—of the gender gap in labor force participation over the last twenty years. In addition, we released country snapshots, which provide an overview of the status of girls and women in each country.

In honor of Women's Equality Day, we released a new No Ceilings visualization exploring how disparities in wealth engender gaps in primary school completion. Girls from low-income households are often at the greatest disadvantage in their access to basic education, most predominantly in Middle Eastern and African countries. For all of the inequalities that exist in the U.S. school systems, there are millions of girls around the world who don't have the opportunity to graduate elementary school, let alone attend it.

Last Friday, we had a chapter of Girls Who Code, a group of 20 girls between the ages of 15-18, in the studio for a visit. They shared great tips on how a succulent garden could really liven up our studio space, and gave a convincing discourse on why the chocolate chip is superior to the raisin, but more importantly they asked tons of really thoughtful and insightful questions about our projects, process, and goals here at Fathom.

We're pleased to announce the release of the No Ceilings data... in 3D. Yes, we know everything is cooler in 3D (the IMAX, Jurassic World, printing, real life), but our decision to represent the No Ceilings map as a 3D globe for mobile devices is better attributed to the design and processing limitations of phones rather than an attempt at enhancing our street cred.

We're pleased to announce the launch of our latest project, Space Monkeys and Tiger Wine: A Look at Global Animal Trade. Built for National Geographic, the project explores the quantity, purpose, and primary locations of trade for thousands of animal species around the globe. Between the exchange of duck livers for homeopathic flu medication, ground turtle shells for anti-aging remedies, and deer glands for their fragrant musk, more than 27 million animals were traded worldwide for reasons you've possibly (and we had certainly) never imagined.

From the start of their education to the prime of their careers, women's professional paths look rather different from their male colleagues. The extent to which workplace inequity influences women's careers, though, varies by locale in a way you may not expect.

One in four girls worldwide marries before her 18th birthday. Child marriage violates basic human rights, and denies millions of girls worldwide the control over their health, education, and futures. One of the data-driven stories featured in No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, details the prevalence and negative impacts of underage marriage, along with the detrimental effects it can have for girls, their families, and their wider communities.

No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, features a myriad of data-driven stories on the global progress of women and girls over the last twenty years. Cutting across gains in health, education, economic participation, leadership, security, and communication, the stories reveal areas that have experienced the greatest improvements, as well as places where the gaps remain. In the vein of women’s leadership, No Ceilings features a dichotomous story on women’s political participation: while women often vote at comparable rates to men, they are often under-represented in positions of national government.

Since its initial launch in the spring of 2014, we've recently finished updates to the Poverty Tracker. The tool, built with Robin Hood, shows how the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) underestimates the number of New York City residents suffering from financial poverty, material hardship, and health challenges. The recently developed Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) gives a more accurate depiction of what it means to live in poverty by considering location, modern-day spending habits, and varying sources of income. The latest update incorporates new survey results from Columbia University and Robin Hood to show how poverty is related to health and neighborhood services.

Daily diets vary considerably around the world—and the food we eat often mirrors the wider structural circumstances of the places we live in. Whether influenced by strained foreign relations, growing economies, fluctuating market prices, or shifting environmental conditions, the food we consume depends on where we live. What the World Eats, our latest piece for National Geographic’s Future of Food series, compares national diets and consumption patterns across a variety of countries over the last 50 years.

We’re thrilled to announce our latest project for the Clinton Foundation’s No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. The video, released this morning at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), outlines advancements and setbacks of women and girls over the last twenty years, with particular focus on their access to education and economic participation.

Lo and behold, on the first official Urban Agriculture Day in the City of Boston, we are excited to release our latest project, urb.ag. The tool enables users to find locations where they can pursue different urban agriculture activities around the city. By selecting a specific location, you can see which farming opportunities are available, and which actions you'll need to take to start a commercial farm in Boston.

Last week Ben spoke at the Thomson Reuters Knowledge Worker Innovation Series. Hosted by Mona Vernon, Vice President of the Data Innovation Lab at Thomson Reuters, the series is intended to bring together innovators and entrepreneurs who are interested in understanding how knowledge work is evolving.

With two visitors and a weeklong culinary tour* of Beacon Hill, we've had a busy few weeks here at Fathom.

In partnership with Nike, we’ve created NikeFuel Weather Activity, a website that connects 2013 Nike+ FuelBand activity with localized weather data, allowing users to see how daily temperature, rain, and snow affect personal, statewide, and national movement patterns in the U.S. The site features an interactive map that illustrates how states and regions react differently to changes in the weather. You can see, for instance, that what’s considered warm in the Midwest is still too cold for the South to get moving, or that the Rocky Mountain states are the only region to turn up their intensity in extreme heat. In addition, the site provides Nike+ FuelBand users with personalized stats and interactive graphics, so individuals can see how temperature, rain, and snow affect their minute-to-minute and daily activity patterns.

If you’re in New York City between now and May 10, stop by the TriBeCa art space, apexart to see the latest Coding the Body exhibit. Organized by friend and former M.I.T. Media Lab professor Leah Buechley, “Coding the Body interrogates the relationship between human and code. It explores how code is being used to understand, control, decorate, and replicate us.” At a time when our lives are increasingly defined by codes—whether written by genetics, religion, or software—Leah's exhibit explores the fascinating, enchanting, and occasionally unnerving relationships that  develop between humans and code.

When Robin Hood first came to us with the intent of visually representing poverty and disadvantage in New York City, we were fascinated to learn that our understanding of poverty was based off of an outdated and inaccurate federal measurement. The Poverty Tracker, Robin Hood’s latest initiative, measures financial poverty, material hardship, and health challenges to give a more accurate depiction of what it means to be poor in New York City. In the analysis, construction, and design of this project, we felt it particularly important to remind ourselves throughout the process that we were looking at people—not numbers.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded a grant from the Knight Foundation! After working with Knight to navigate the civic tech landscape, we thought they would be a great resource to help us explore a more personal project. The Knight Prototype Fund helps media makers, technologists, and tinkerers take ideas from concept to demo, so it seemed the perfect starting point to bring our latest project on urban agriculture to life.

It’s been exactly a year since Professor Kristen Coogan's Information Design class from Boston University came by for a visit, so we were glad to have them back for another tour in 2013. While it was a bummer that two members of the “dad” side of our office were out sick today, their empty chairs fortunately allowed us to accommodate seating for our 16 guests. Once everyone got settled on the third floor, Katy and Terrence began an overview of some of the work we’ve been cooking up in the past year.

If a picture is worth one thousand words, then think of the following process video as a nonfiction novella. You can remove your reading glasses as necessary.

Friends, foes, and country people: we would like to cordially invite you to experience the Fathom Bracket (2013 March Madness edition).