Pro tip: When you Google “define <INSERT WORD HERE>” and open the information card, you can see the etymology of the word in flowchart form and word usage over time.

[via @wattenberg]

NPR digs into accessible playgrounds, because everyone should get to play.

Remember running around the playground when you were a kid? Maybe hanging from the monkey bars or seeing who could swing the highest?

It wasn’t just a mindless energy burn. Many have called play the work of childhood. Play teaches children how to make friends, make rules and navigate relationships.

But for kids whose disabilities keep them from using playgrounds, those opportunities can be lost.

New federal requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act are changing the landscape for public playgrounds, requiring them to include equipment, materials and designs that provide children with disabilities the same play opportunities as typical children.

Be sure to look at the app, which serves as both a way to find the nearest playground near you and as a way for you to help build a reference for parents. They’ve found over 1,200 playgrounds for kids to play at so far.

Andrei Kolmogorov is a name unfamiliar to most, but his work had lasting impact. Slava Gerovitch profiled the mathematician, describing the change in thought towards probability theory, which was once more of a joke than a serious approach to evaluate the world. I especially liked the bit about Kolmogorov’s appreciation for the arts.

Music and literature were deeply important to Kolmogorov, who believed he could analyze them probabilistically to gain insight into the inner workings of the human mind. He was a cultural elitist who believed in a hierarchy of artistic values. At the pinnacle were the writings of Goethe, Pushkin, and Thomas Mann, alongside the compositions of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven—works whose enduring value resembled eternal mathematical truths. Kolmogorov stressed that every true work of art was a unique creation, something unlikely by definition, something outside the realm of simple statistical regularity. “Is it possible to include [Tolstoy’s War and Peace] in a reasonable way into the set of ‘all possible novels’ and further to postulate the existence of a certain probability distribution in this set?” he asked, sarcastically, in a 1965 article.

In Kindred Britain, Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks and Scott Murray provide a visual exploration of how thousands of well-known British people are connected through blood and marriage.
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Statistician (and brand new PhD student) Jerzy Wieczorek explains the usefulness of a master’s degree in statistics.

There’s a huge difference between undergraduate Stats 101 (apply a few standard procedures to nice clean datasets) and real data analysis work (figure out how to clean the data and modify your procedures to the messy context in front of you). So a masters-level mathematical/theoretical stats course, where you learn to prove which estimators have desirable properties or to derive tests that are appropriate in a given situation, is invaluable when you run into non-standard problems. The masters degree will also expose you to many techniques that you probably didn’t cover as an undergrad: designing good experiments, computer-intensive methods like the bootstrap, special-use techniques like time series or spatial statistics, other inference philosophies like Bayesian statistics, etc.

Yep.

Of course Jerzy and me are slightly biased. Saying a master’s degree in statistics isn’t worthwhile is like saying we wasted our time, but if you really want to learn data — whether it’s for analysis, visualization, journalism, or whatever — statistics helps you get there.

And whereas the PhD route takes a certain type of person, most master’s degrees take only two years to finish, and your analysis skills increase exponentially compared to that of an undergrad. Graduate statistics is also way more interesting, because you focus more on practical usage and less on hypothesis tests.

Jan Willem Tulp, for this month’s Scientific American food issue, recreated the flavor network described by Yong-Yeol Ahn, et al.

Julia Child famously said that fat carries flavor, but perhaps instead we should give thanks to 4-methylpentanoic acid. Unique combinations of such chemical compounds give foods their characteristic flavors. Science-minded chefs have gone so far as to suggest that seemingly incongruous ingredients—chocolate and blue cheese, for example—will taste great together as long as they have enough flavor compounds in common. Scientists recently put this hypothesis to the test by creating a flavor map, a variant of which we have reproduced here.

The original by Yong-Yeol Ahn et al was a more traditional network graph. Foods with more similar flavor compounds were closer together. In contrast, Tulp categorizes points in vertical columns by their food group and are placed based on number of shared compounds with other foods.

It’s spaghetti at first, but give it some mental time and filter with the interaction. Start from the top at roasted beef and work your way down.

Graham Roberts, a graphics and multimedia editor at The New York Times, is teaching an online class on how to make animated information graphics and design storyboards. It’s a chance to learn from one of the best. Plus, the first 30 people who use the code “YAUDATA” get 50 percent off, which is a steal.

As China moves forward with a plan to move 250 million people to cities, officials developed a need to keep track of how many people are still in rural areas. The problem was that local data from the provinces is unreliable, so instead they use what they call a “pickle index” which banks on the correlation between the amount of pickles eaten by rural residents and population.

According to the South China Morning Post, the country’s National Development and Reform Commission has found that sales of zha cai, a pickled mustard tuber, provide a better guide to population flows than often unreliable provincial statistical data. As an unnamed planner explained to the Economic Observer:

“Under normal circumstances, urban consumption levels of convenience foods such as instant noodles and pickled mustard is essentially constant. Therefore, we can assume that volume changes are mainly caused by a city’s floating population.”

Maybe we can work out a hot dog index for the US. [via Waxy]

If my inbox has taught me anything, it’s that there are a lot of data job openings, and there are a lot of qualified people for these jobs. The FlowingData Job Board is a place where companies with the former can reach the latter and where those looking for a job can easily find what’s available.

The ideal jobs will be in statistics, data science, visualization, and design, and you can post different job types, from freelance up to full-time. In addition to the board, listings will also appear on FlowingData.

I used to have a forum for this, and it was by far the most active section, but it was spam-challenged and the quality was lacking sometimes. I hope this format lends itself to higher quality listings.

The introductory price for a 30-day listing is $49.

Post a job today. Let’s see where this goes.

Dan Keating and Darla Cameron for the Washington Post mapped commonly used languages in the US household.

More than a quarter of counties in the United States have at least one in 10 households where English is not the language spoken at home. Spanish is, by far, the most common language other than English spoken in the home, especially on the West Coast, in the Southwest, the Eastern urban corridor and other big cities. Native American languages are also common in the West, as is French around New Orleans and in some counties in the Northeast. German is a common language in some Midwestern and Western areas.

Be sure to pay attention to the legend in this one. I bet a lot of people read this map as the most commonly spoken languages by county and thought Spanish is about to become the national language.

From the David Rumsey map collection, the detailed map of San Francisco Chinatown shows areas of known illicit activity.

In 1885, at the height of the anti-Chinese hysteria in California, the official Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors was issued, reporting on the “Condition of the Chinese Quarter and the Chinese in San Francisco.” This inflammatory report included the rare folding color map of Chinatown, but in the usual “small-scale” version (approx. 8½x19½ inches). This map was also issued in the San Francisco Municipal Report of 1884-85, and in Farwell’s The Chinese at Home and Abroad (see our 5807.000).

The faded red color indicates gambling houses, green for Chinese prostitution, yellow for opium resorts, and blue for white prostitution. [via Mapping the Nation]

The title says it all. Jonathon Green, a slang lexicographer, has two new timelines. The first is an interactive timeline that shows slang for male genitalia going all the way back to the 1300s up to present. Colors and shapes represent different parts.
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Mathematician Hannah Fry is back with another video. She explains why it seems like everyone in your network — on Twitter, Facebook, and in real life — is more popular than you and how we can use this idea to predict the spread of diseases. Fry’s understated presentation style totally enhances the interesting subject matter.

Josh Sundquist and Hannah Hart made a video about pies, the edible variety with the chart made with the edible.

[Thanks, Lee]

Alexander Chen visualized “You Still Believe in Me” by the Beach Boys.

This is a visualization of Beach Boys vocals inspired by the physics of church bells. Using a mathematical relationship between a the circumference of a circular surface and pitch, I wrote code that draws a circle for each note of the song.

Google released a 21-part short video series that introduces R. Most of the videos are about two minutes, with none of them going over six, and each one is a on focused task or concept. So this could be a good way to start. Just open R, start a video, and follow along.

Here’s the first video in the series. It shows you how to write a simple script and navigate:

[via Revolutions]

Some readers asked about career choices in visualization recently, and I was about to write a response until I remembered I already did in 2008. A few group names changed and examples in some areas are easier to come by, but most of it is still valid.

You still find a lot of jobs in journalism, business-related analytics, at design studios, research labs (academic and industry), and freelance. It seems like there are more opportunities now than there were then. There are also a lot more tech-related jobs now. In 2008, Twitter hadn’t quite hit mainstream yet and most parents weren’t on Facebook, whereas now, web companies sit on more data than they can interpret.

There are visualization jobs pretty much wherever there is data. Which is practically everywhere.

That said, there’s also more competition for these jobs, and high school science fair Microsoft Excel experience probably won’t be enough to get you the job you want.

So one more important addition to the 2008 post: Learn statistics. It still surprises me how little statistics visualization people know (generally speaking of course). Look at job listings though, and most employers list it in the required skill set, so it’s a big plus for you hiring-wise.

It’s easy to think of online activity as a whirlwind of chatter and battles for loudest voice, because, well, a lot of it is that. We saw it just recently with the burst of emojis and what happens in just one second online. But maybe that’s because people tend to present the bits that way. Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi approached it differently in Listen to Wikipedia.

The project is an abstract visualization and sonification of the Wikipedia feed for recent changes, which includes additions, deletions, and new users. Bells, strings, and a rich tone represent the activities, respectively. Unlike other projects that attempt to hit you with an overwhelmed feeling, Listen oddly provides a calm. I left the tab open in the background for half an hour.

Listen is open source.