There are a handful of ways to express laughter online, and it appears there are subtle differences in demographics, based on what you use. After reading an anecdotal story in the New Yorker by Sarah Larson, Facebook Research looked at the data.
Read More

Reddit user noveltysin wore a Fitbit during sex, and then posted a screenshot of her heart rate estimates.

So yeah. There that is. See the reddit thread for a mature and academic discussion of the data, including a line-by-line adult parody of Eminem’s Lose Yourself.

Doesn’t quite beat the marriage proposal heartbeat.

Elisa Long, a professor in Decisions, Operations, and Technology Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, was diagnosed with breast cancer. The Price is Right films a breast cancer awareness episode every August. Long wanted to get on that show. So she watched episodes during her 6-hour chemotherapy sessions to familiarize herself with games and rules, and most importantly, to maximize her odds of winning.

Long describes her thought process and probability calculations on her way to surviving cancer and winning it all on The Price is Right.

My goal in going on “The Price Is Right” was to play the best I possibly could given tremendous uncertainty about the outcome. The same was true for my breast cancer. The stakes were just higher.

Ah, the uncertainty of life.

Analytics continues its spread into the various facets of sports. Just recently, the Denver Broncos hired a director of analytics, Mitch Tanney, who will be available to coaches on the field to provide probabilities that inform in-game decisions.
Read More

In the most recent update to their atlas coming in September, National Geographic explains the shrinking Arctic through the lens of previous atlas maps. It’s not looking good.
Read More

When you first learn statistics, visualization, or any data-related subject, the data usually is given to you in a ready-to-use format. This is so that you can spend most of your time on the topic of interest. But once you step outside the learning bubble, data rarely comes in the format you want.

Marc Bellemare, an associate professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, provides some practical tips on how to deal with this. Bellemare’s parting advice:

Really, there is no big secret to cleaning data other than “Document everything” and to save everything in different files and in different locations (i.e., your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive), and there is no other way to learn data cleaning than by doing it.

Yep.

Some of the tips are in the context of specific software environment, but you can easily apply them to more general situations.

Tabula, available for Windows and Mac, lets you extract data from PDF files, and it just got an update. The user interface got an overhaul and it’s now easier to grab data from multiple pages. I wrote about Tabula last year, but orgs continue to publish data in PDF files, and sometimes PDF is just all there is. So this is definitely a good thing.

Keep it in your toolbox.

Government data sites are typically sluggish and a pain to use. So many forms. So slow. So much cruft in the way of what you really want. We went over this.

Reply All, one of my favorite podcasts, talked to technologist Clay Johnson about why government sites are like this. It’s not so much the people as it is the system that gets in the way of making things better.
Listen to the podcast

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down a year ago, and with recently found debris that is possibly from the flight, researchers have a few more bits of data to work from. The New York Times picked up on coverage of what’s going on, and in the latest, they provide an animated map that shows possible routes the debris could have taken. This is based on computer models from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and suggests a search area.

Poverty is on the rise. Justin Palmer mapped it for major cities in the United States.
Read More

Pennsylvania is considering the use of risk assessment — the chances that someone will commit a crime in the future — in criminal sentencing. Risk assessment is already used in every state to some regard, so why not extend the concept? FiveThirtyEight and The Marshall Project look at the WTF-ness of this question.
Read More

Lukasz Piwek is chipping away at a collection of Tufte-style charts using R, along with the code snippets. Fittingly, the project is called Tufte in R. The Tufte stuff is nice and all, but that’s not why I like this project. Two reasons.
Read More

The Washington Post mapped power plants in the United States by type and capacity in megawatts. Color indicates the former, and bubble size indicates the latter. There are a lot more natural gas power plants, supplying 30 percent of the nation’s energy, than I expected.

See the article for a map for each type, along with a state-level breakdown.

Based on annual high school play and musical rankings from the magazine Dramatics, which date back to 1938, NPR charted the most popular plays by decade. For a variety of reasons — cast size, family-friendliness, and licensing — the oldies still reign.
Read More

Here’s a straightforward stacked area chart from the Economist that shows shifting market share in the technology sector. It highlights the quick shrinkage of IBM in the 1990s, Microsoft reign soon after, and the apple surge mid-2000s. Be sure to look at the nominal and real views too, because even though relative dominance shifted, the sector as a whole is up and up.

Todd Schneider likes trivia, and he plays in an online league called LearnedLeague. Curious, Schneider wondered if there was anything interesting he could glean from the performance of the LLamas (Learned League members) that might apply to knowledge in general.
Read More