Links for October 19th

Frontline: The U.S. Immigration Detention BoomThis map of the growth of immigrant detention facilities is a great—and alarming—illustration of the rise of these ever-larger, often private facilities. Wikipedia: Northwest AngleInsufficient understanding of North American geography in the late 1700s resulted in the Treaty of Paris accidentally assigning a notch of land in Canada to the …

Links for May 2nd

New York Times: A Tipping Point for Gay Marriage?With the government unable to muster a legally defensible argument against gay marriage, it's amazing that the House of Representatives went ahead and hired their own private law firm to carry on the right. But it's more amazing still that the law firm dropped the case, finding …

Links for March 24th

Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in …