Data Lab Link Roundup: Targeting ads with DNA, data physicalization, AWS in plain English, the True Size of Countries, Every Noise at Once, and stop using VLOOKUP

And we’re back! Here are some things that caught our attention last week:

• In case you missed it last month, FiveThirtyEight published a superb feature on why “Science Isn’t Broken” which illustrates how hard it is to get a “rigorous results”. Hold onto your p-values. 

• “Freedom to Tinker” is one of my favorite blogs. The folks at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy have a habit of discussing the most interesting issues at the intersection of technology, society and policy. Last week they discussed how “Ancestry.com can use your DNA to target ads”

• Glenn Mcdonald from music technology company EchnoNest built the charming visual application “Every Noise at Once” which provides an “algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1385 genres” With samples.

• On the theme of data visualization, how about some “Data Physicalization”?  Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen maintain this fantastic list of physical visualizations ranging from Mesopotamian clay tokens to the London Eye used as a donut chart. Now where did I put my 3D printer?

• OK, one more visualization (and potentially enormous distraction if you’re so inclined) “The True Size Of” lets you pick countries on a (Mercator projected) map and drag them around to compare their “real” sizes. Obligatory XKCD.

• If you’re in the data science business these days, the chances are you’ve used Amazon Web Services or AWS. You will also know that they like to name their services things like “Elastic Beanstalk” or “Swinging Orangutan” which is charming, but unhelpful. The folks at Expedited SSL wrote a great primer on “AWS in Plain English”. And I was (probably) kidding about the Orangutan.

• “When you use VLOOKUP, stop using it”, truer words were never spoken and when it’s Joel Spolsky saying them in his irreverent Excel Tutorial it’s worth taking notice. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll definitely pick up a tip or two.  The subject he covers, essentially writing “self documenting spreadsheets” is a hugely undervalued (and missing!) skill.

• Finally, a couple of blogs  - earlier in August the UN released updated population figures and my colleague and I wrote about “The Future of the World’s Population in 4 charts”. And more recently, the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation released updated estimates which shows that: “In 2015, the global child mortality rate is less than half its 1990 levels, but the MDG 4 target has not been met”.