Yesterday, Google formally announced its public data explorer, a cool new tool allowing anyone to make visualizations of government records and post them as embeds online. 

We’ve posted about this site before, but now it has many new features, filters and data sets. Here’s a chart we created from U.S. Census Bureau data that shows the five counties in Texas that grew at the highest rate from 2000-2008. 

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Matt Stiles covered government and politics for the Tribune, with a focus on data journalism, from 2009 to 2011. He oversaw and developed the Tribune’s library of web applications and interactive graphics....