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The Week In Data: Ticker-Tape Parades, Birth Control And $100

This is The Week In Data, our data journalism roundup. Here you’ll find the most-read FiveThirtyEight articles of the past week, as well as gems we spotted elsewhere on the Internet.

MOST READ

  1. The Spurs Are Going To Be Really Good — Like, Golden State Warriors Good
  2. The U.S.’s Early Lead In The World Cup Final Was Even Crazier Than It Seemed
  3. How Your Favorite Baseball Team Blows Its Money
  4. Carli Lloyd’s Historic Hat Trick Won The World Cup
  5. DeAndre Jordan Made The Right Call
  6. Bernie Sanders Could Win Iowa And New Hampshire. Then Lose Everywhere Else.
  7. The Royals Basically Have As Many All-Stars As They Deserve
  8. It’s 2015 — You’d Think We’d Have Figured Out How To Measure Web Traffic By Now
  9. Luis Valbuena Is Having A Very Weird Season With The Astros
  10. Women Get Equal Pay, But Not Equal Billing, At Wimbledon

ELSEWHERE ON THE INTERNET

Canyon of Heroes: After the U.S. women’s national soccer team won the World Cup, New York honored the women with a ticker-tape parade last week. This chart shows us the spirited history of those who’ve earned ticker-tape parades in New York, dating to the 1910s. From celebrating world leaders to “adventurers,” there have been some curious reasons for ticker-tape parades. (See: Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan in 1938.) [Noah Veltman]

Ticker-tape parades

In one map: With some caveats, a new collection of high school graduation data at the district level gives us a more nuanced comparison across states and regions. [The Hechinger Report]

High School Graduation Rates

Experiments in birth control: After a six-year, statewide initiative, Colorado saw a surge in the number of young women using long-acting birth control, especially in the poorest parts of the state. Records indicate that one-fifth of women aged 18 to 44 in Colorado are now using long-acting contraception. Even more striking: the birthrate and rate of abortions among teenagers dropped by 40 and 42 percent, respectively, from 2009 to 2013. [The New York Times]

Surge in heroin-related deaths: The rate of heroin-overdose deaths has nearly quadrupled in the United States in the past 10 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase is associated with an uptick in usage, partly because the drug is relatively cheap and widely available. [Quartz]

Deaths by heroin overdose

Black elected prosecutors: A new study calls attention to the dearth of black elected prosecutors across the country: Among states that elect prosecutors, 66 percent have no black people in the position. Seventy-nine percent of elected state and local prosecutors were white men in 2014. [The New York Times]

The relative value of $100: New federal data shows that your money goes further in Mississippi than in any other state. In fact, a dollar — or 100 of them — will get you more in the South or Midwest than in the Northeast or California. [The Washington Post]

Relative Value of $100

A certain je ne sais quoi: A sociologist at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique looked at the first names of 350,000 students and their 2015 school exam results. He found the highest scores among girls named Joséphine, Diane, Alice, Apolline and Alix, and the top-scoring boys’ name was Théophile. Every year, these statistics from the sociologist spark a little national debate in France about sociological determinism — this year probably won’t be an exception. (Be warned, it’s in French!) [The Huffington Post]

Hannah Fingerhut is a former data reporting intern for FiveThirtyEight.

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