A one-off tumblr that catalogs stock images that depict the tumultuous, rising sea of big data. Nice.

Still though, nothing beats Big Star Trek Data.

Wi-fi is embedded in our everyday lives so much that we don’t pay much attention unless it’s not around. We’ve seen it translated visually a couple of times. But this time, Phantom Terrains, by Frank Swain and Daniel Jones and visualization by Stefanie Posavec, translates networks into sound.

Phantom Terrains is an experimental platform which aims to answer this question by translating the characteristics of wireless networks into sound. By streaming this signal to a pair of hearing aids, the listener is able to hear the changing landscapes of data that surround them. Network identifiers, data rates and encryption modes are translated into sonic parameters, with familiar networks becoming recognizable by their auditory representations.

Above is a test walk around the BBC Broadcasting House. Listen to signals translated to what kind of sounds like alien communications.

People die, and for various reasons many bodies go unclaimed. In Los Angeles county, the bodies go to the county crematory. The Los Angeles Times reports, along with a searchable database of the unclaimed in 2011.

If relatives can be found, they are notified by the morgue or the coroner that their loved one’s body is available for pickup by a mortuary. If a family can’t afford the mortuary fees, the county handles cremation.

The cost is typically $352 for a case handled by the coroner and $466 for others. Although that must be paid before the ashes can be taken, in some cases a family can ask a county supervisor to waive the fee.

Some families simply don’t want to pick up relatives, said Joyce Kato, an investigator at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

The county keeps remains for three years, so the ashes will receive a mass burial if they are not claimed by the end of this year.

Oof, the remains of 137 unclaimed babies in the database and the drawer of paper bags with their remains struck a chord.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lightgrenze, translated to light border, places lighted balloons where the wall used to be.
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Here’s some weekend project data for you. Reddit user trexmatt dumped a dataset for 216,930 Jeopardy! questions and answers in JSON and CSV formats, a scrape from the J! Archive. Each clue is represented by category, money value, the clue itself, the answer, round, show number, and air date.

I’m not sure what I’d do with the data, but the first thing that comes to mind is investigating the hunt for Daily Doubles. Where are those things usually placed, and how random is it? Oh wait, someone already did that.

Have fun poking.

Electronic Traces, by Lesia Trubat, tracks ballet movements and allows dancers to see the traces of their feet.
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Peyton Manning, quarterback for the Denver Broncos, passed up Brett Favre’s career record of 508 passing touchdowns. Manning, currently at 510 passing touchdowns, is now setting his own records that won’t be beat for a long while. Gregor Aisch and Kevin Quealy for the Upshot chart out Manning’s trajectory of quarterbacks past and present.

Those who have followed New York Times graphics might recognize a similar time series display from when baseball player Alex Rodriguez* joined the 600 home run club. Or from 2007, when Barry Bonds* chased the all-time home run record. It’s kind of fun to see the graphics grow bigger, brighter, and more open over the years. Flash disappears. Multi-line voronoi comes in.

At the base though, it’s the same chart, and it’s still good.

The New York Times pushed out super-detailed, precinct-level maps for the Senate election. The maps are also interactive, work well, and don’t take forever to load. As my dad would say — holy moly.

Todd Lindeman and Lazaro Gamio for the Washington Post explored shooting patterns for last year’s Washington Wizards.
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In the department of comparing large numbers to objects and situations that are slightly more relatable, this graphic from Nature explores citations in research.

The bar on the left shows the height of a theoretical stack of papers that represents the first page of every paper cataloged in Web of Science. It would almost reach the height of Mount Kilimanjaro. The breakout stack is a zoomed in view of the 14,351 paper pages with at least 1,000 citations, and finally, the magnified orange section represents the top 100 papers. Also a flying bug.

Look! More size of very big things with large numbers, compared against things that you’re kind of familiar with. Does this ever get old? The answer is no. Because measurements of planets might as well be random large numbers without anything to scale, John Brady placed things from space on Earth and vice versa.
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David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk, does some back-of-the-napkin math to describe why recent prostitution estimates for the UK are problematic.

As always, it’s best to do a simple reality check. The ONS assumptions come to around 61,000,000 visits a year. Let’s say 50,000,000 are from locals rather than foreign visitors. There are around 27,000,000 men between 18 and 50 in the UK (taking an arbitrary upper limit), so this would mean that on average each of them buys sex twice a year. In fact the latest Natsal survey found that 3.6% of men reported paying for sex in the last 5 years – let’s say that means that considerably less than 1,000,000 men a year pay for sex, maybe 500,000. So the ONS assumptions mean that men who pay for sex do so on average twice a week. This seems high.

The assumptions also mean that the average person working in prostitution is turning over nearly £100,000 a year, which Jolyon from Tax Relief 4 Escorts says is completely implausible, and he should know.

Spiegelhalter makes a few of his own assumptions in there, but you can see why estimating illegal activity and then using those numbers to calculate gross domestic product can be a challenge.

If you recall, the gross domestic product for the United Kingdom rose by 5 percent, largely in part due to estimates trying to account for drug sales and prostitution. Given that illegal activity and careful, public record-keeping typically don’t go together, the new numbers were rough at best. For prostitution in particular, the numbers from the Office of National Statistics estimated an extra £5.7 billion added to the GDP.

The problem now is that the United Kingdom, as a member of the European Union, apparently owes £1.7 billion. This is based on gross national income which uses gross domestic product in its equation. Ouch. Consequences.

NPR spent some time on the subject of the decline of women in computer science. Whereas the the percentage of women in other technical fields rose, the percentage of women in computer science declined, as shown in the chart above. Although it’s tough to pinpoint a single factor, the time of decline coincides with when computer were mostly marketed towards boys in the 1980s.

In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.

On Quora, someone asked, “What are the chances of survival of individual chess pieces in average games?” Oliver Brennan answered by looking at the moves from 2.2 million games.

The situation with the c-d-e pawns is very interesting. The most survivable central pawn is the White c-pawn (42%), while White’s d-pawn is the most doomed of all the chessmen (24%) – more so even than the knights (~26%). There’s a pleasing symmetry in the survival rates of the White and Black c- and e-pawns that suggests they’re frequently exchanged on the d-file. Bishops survive around 35% of the time, with the kingside bishops slightly more likely to survive than queenside ones.

Code available if you want to poke. [via Know More]

Ipsos MORI, primarily a marketing research group I think, released results of their study on public perception of demographics versus reality, on numbers such as immigration, religion, and life expectancy. The key takeaway is that out of the people they polled from fourteen countries, the average person typically over- or underestimated — by a lot.
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Accompanying their segment on Halloween stores stocking costumes, NPR ranks bestsellers for the past four years, based on data from the National Retail Foundation. Note that these are rankings for adult costumes, so it’s safe to assume that all of these costume names are preceded by “sexy.” (Kidding.)

I’m surprised there aren’t more topical costumes towards the top. For example, the segment touches on Walter White costumes flying off the shelves last year, but I’m guessing the data probably only covers the pre-packaged stuff. Also guessing a similar reason for why Superman and Batman aren’t counted as generic superhero, or Dracula as vampire.

See the full graphic on NPR.

Say you have time series data and you want to detect significant changes, but there’s also a lot of noise to sift through. Twitter released an open source R package, BreakoutDetection, to help with that.

Our main motivation behind creating the package has been to develop a technique to detect breakouts which are robust, from a statistical standpoint, in the presence of anomalies. The BreakoutDetection package can be used in wide variety of contexts. For example, detecting breakout in user engagement post an A/B test, detecting behavioral change, or for problems in econometrics, financial engineering, political and social sciences.

Was a quick installation and worked as expected for me. Twitter has released plenty of open source projects, but I think this is the first R package. Nice.

Adam Cohen and his group are using genetically-modified neurons that light up when the cells activate to see the communication between neurons in high detail.

More from New Scientist:

Cohen’s team is using the technique to compare cells from typical brains with those from people with disorders such as motor neuron disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Rather than taking a brain sample, they remove some of the person’s skin cells and grow them alongside chemicals that rewind the cells into an embryonic-like state. Another set of chemicals is used to turn these stem cells into neurons. “You can recreate something reminiscent of the person’s brain in the dish,” says Cohen.

Couple that with super slow motion video. Then patterns.