Data Lab Link Roundup: June 29th, 2015

A visual explanation of the Monty Hall Problem

I’m going to start writing more about the activities, experiments and research that we’ve been doing as part of our “Data Lab” here in the World Bank Data team and across the rest of the institution.

But first, something I enjoy on other blogs (e.g. David McKenzie over at “Development Impact”) is a “link roundup” of interesting content authors came across in the past week. So in this tradition, here are some things that caught our attention last week: 

• FiveThirtyEight launched a new data-focussed podcast: “What’s the Point” with the tagline “Big data, small interviews”. The first two programs feature Nate Silver and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  

• News outlet Quartz launched Atlas - an aggregator for the charts and data visualizations that appear on their site. It takes advantage of their open source “Chartbuilder” tool that several other sites have taken and customized for their house styles.

• Setosa is a wonderful gallery of “Visual Explanations” on often counterintuitive topics like Simpson’s Paradox, The Monty Hall Problem, and The Central Limit Theorem.

• Nathan Yau of Flowing Data paid a beautiful homage to the first 1874 edition of Statistical Atlas using data from 2015

• Aaron Maxwell shared a great “Underused Python Idiom” for improving the simple task of opening and reading data from a file.

Finally, in recognition of the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay marriage, David Robinson inadvertently started a challenge to fit in a tweet the most convincing rainbow generated by R and ggplot: