The internet changed how sex workers and clients find each other and how the former does business. Allison Schrager, Christopher Groskopf, and Scott Cunningham, reporting for Quartz, delve into actual numbers using scraped data from The Erotic Review:

Sex work is as old as civilization, but in the past 20 years the market for illegal sex services has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the internet, upending how it is sold and priced. There are now more women selling sex, more overall encounters, and—unlike in many other industries disrupted by the web—higher wages for workers.

Also safer (although still with its inherent risks).

Google equipped their Street View cars with air quality sensors and sent them around several California areas.

We’re just beginning to understand what’s possible with this hyper-local information and today, we’re starting to share some of our findings for the three California regions we’ve mapped: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and California’s Central Valley (the Street View cars drove 100,000 miles, over the course of 4,000 hours to collect this data!) Scientists and air quality specialists can use this information to assist local organizations, governments, and regulators in identifying opportunities to achieve greater air quality improvements and solutions.

Maps.

Using Climate Central sea-level rise estimates, The Guardian plots and maps the potential consequences of a 3.2-degree rise in temperature by 2100.

One of the biggest resulting threats to cities around the world is sea-level rise, caused by the expansion of water at higher temperatures and melting ice sheets on the north and south poles.

Scientists at the non-profit organisation Climate Central estimate that 275 million people worldwide live in areas that will eventually be flooded at 3C of global warming.

Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich reporting for The New York Times:

Under the Paris deal, each country put forward a proposal to curtail its greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But no major industrialized country is currently on track to fulfill its pledge, according to new data from the Climate Action Tracker. Not the European Union. Not Canada. Not Japan. And not the United States, which under President Trump is still planning to leave the Paris agreement by 2020.

A series of charts shows the path we’re headed, what we need to do to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, and what we need to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Not looking good.

David C. Brock writing for IEEE Spectrum delves into the origins of PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene 30 years ago, in 1987. Remarkably, the founders of the Silicon Valley firm that created PowerPoint did not set out to make presentation software, let alone build a tool that would transform group communication throughout the world. Rather, PowerPoint was a recovery from dashed hopes that pulled a struggling startup back from the brink of failure—and succeeded beyond anything its creators could have imagined.

Little did the creators know, they would be responsible for so many kittens’ lives.

Ukranian band Obiymy Doschu released a new song Razom. “It’s a uplifting and tender song about being afraid of your own hapiness and holding your feelings inside, and that sometimes just a little step in the direction of a loved one will help you find yourself again.” Sounds good to me.

The lead singer is also an engineer at Mapbox, and he made a visualization to accompany a song. Each circle represents a musician, and they size based on the person’s prominence during the song.

Calming.

Choropleth maps, the ones where regions are filled with colors based on data, grow easier to make. However, choosing colors, the number of colors, and the breakpoints is often less straightforward, because the answer is always context-specific. Lisa Charlotte Rost, now at Datawrapper, provides a rundown of the decision process.

The explanation is in the context of the Datawrapper tool, but you can easily apply the logic to your own workflow.

Researchers from NVIDIA published work with artificial intelligence algorithms, or more specifically, generative adversarial networks, to produce celebrity faces in high detail. Watch the results below.

Nutty.

Hierarchical models, or multilevel models, are used to represent data that might vary on, you guessed, different levels. Michael Freeman, from the University of Washington Information School, provides an introduction to the method using a scrolling format. The transitions give a good sense of how the model can change, depending on your approach.

As the list of sexual assault allegations grows for Harvey Weinstein (and many others who abused their power), Axios charted the time between events and public allegations. Painful decades.

With data visualization, you start with the data and let it guide geometry, colors, etc, and from there, you work on aesthetics, readability, and usability. The data informs the design. Project Lincoln is an experiment from Adobe that flips this. You draw shapes and illustrations first and then bind data to them.

Here it is in action:

My brain was confused. Something about this order of things doesn’t feel right. You go in with design first and then bring in the data, and then you edit again? Maybe this would be useful for quick prototypes or visual experiments? It’s hard to say how this would go in practice without actually trying it out, but my gut says no.

ProPublica runs a small annual workshop to teach journalists a bit about data and how it can be used to report. The training materials and some of the lectures are online now.

Though more than a thousand people have applied to ProPublica’s Data Institute, we’ve only been able to accept about 24 in the two years it’s been running. Faced with such a high demand, we’ve looked for ways to help more journalists trying to learn data journalism and interactive database design. In past years, we’ve put our slides and homework assignments online (here’s 2016 and 2017 ), but we also know how valuable it is to be able to see and hear what’s happening in the classroom.

I bet you woke up this morning thinking, “I haven’t seen a good visualization of sorting algorithms in at least a week. I wish someone would get on that.” Well here you go. Wish granted.

See also sorting algorithms explained with dance, books, and sound. And while we’re at it, don’t forget Mike Bostock’s visual essay on visualizing algorithms.

[Thanks @SimStolz]

Add another chart to the genre of heart rate during a significant event. Reddit user failian had an Apple Watch on when he was laid off, so he exported his heart rate data for the day and made this graph.

See also heart rates for a marriage proposal and during sex.

Don Ingber and Charles Reilly of the Wyss Institute used data at the atomic level to visualize the simulation of sperm fertilizing an egg. The researchers used a Star Wars theme.

To see if entertainment could offer a solution to this challenge, Ingber teamed up with Charles Reilly, Ph.D., a molecular biophysicist, professional animator, and Staff Scientist at the Wyss Institute who previously worked at movie director Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post film studio, to create a film that would capture viewers’ imaginations by telling the story of a biological process that was accurate down to the atomic level.

Ingber notes a concern that non-scientists have grown skeptical of science. I’m not sure entertainment in this form is the way to fix that, but at least it was fun to watch. [via Co.Design]

I used to manually select my color schemes with trial and error, but these days, there are a lot of tools to help you pick colors for your charts. The motivation for most of them is to help you visualize your data in a way that is perceptually correct. That is, perceived differences translated between your eyeballs and your brain match the actual quantitative differences.

While there are new tools released fairly often, I tend to stick to these four simple and quick ones. Here they are by purpose.
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